Aug. 11th, 2021

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August 11th, 2021 10:55 pm - 100 days of enemy recs: 16. The Lone Power
I went to a couple days of the free online Crossingscon a couple weeks ago (only a few sessions, sadly, work schedules being what they are, but it's always worth a chance to listen to Ursula Vernon get her raconteur on). One of the sessions was about writing really alien aliens, and Diane Duane talked about wizardry, about how every people has some kind of wizardry, some version of the Oath, but it may look very different than what you are used to or expect, and part of being a wizard is being able to look at all the different kinds of wizardy in all the worlds and know they're still wizardry.

And that really struck a note with me? Because, okay, what I do in Young Wizards-verse, mostly, is come up with crossovers. And when I talk about about Young Wizards crossovers with other people, they often get hung up on but there is no wizardry in that canon! Or they comment on one of the few fics I've written and posted - I had no idea how anybody could make this canon work as a YW crossover, but somehow you did it!

And - look. If there are wizards who are hyperintelligent shades of the color blue - or semi-hivemind biodata expressions with a complicated relationship with time - or individual atoms that form shifting patterns in a mesh - or crystal spiders who outlive Death and think cause and effect are nifty, but optional - if all that is true, and if you know Young Wizards, you know it is - than how can it be harder, somehow, to imagine wizardry among humans who are pretty much the same, just with slightly different rules to their world? And yet, somehow for many people it is harder.

To understand wizardry as it works not just in Nita and Kit's world, or the few worlds they've visited in canon, to understand how it works for fungal mycelia networks or for humans who are lawyers in a New York City that might or might not have the same kind of shadow of Manhattan, you have to be able to boil the Oath down to its very basics: to say, no matter what the wording or recension of the Oath you took, at its core all it takes to be a wizard is to say: "I want to try to help. Can I?" and to hear back, yes. But to be a good wizard, you also have to be able to look at someone else who said "I want to try to help" - even if the language they said it in, the ways they carry it out, their goals, their worldview, their methods - seem to you incomprehensible, or even abominable - to come to them, and see them trying to help, and say, cousin.

And once you've got that far - once you understand that - well. It's not that much farther until you see someone saying, let me help, and you can't remember if Dai stihó and Greetings and defiance really mean anything different after all.

So here's some fics about the Lone One, the Enemy, the Star-Snuffer, the Bringer of Death, the Lord of Entropy, the Fairest and Fallen, having a nice day.


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