Proginoskes Wrote:Am I right in that the primary point of contention is about letting DW dictate magical effects that must be allowed? Just because something is possible in a world connected to Fenspace (and Fenspace was visited by Doug and the Girls; that much is impossible to deny) doesn't mean it's possible in Fenspace. On the other hand (I've clearly been reading too much ponyfic; I almost wrote "other hoof" there), I think Bob is primarily objecting to hard artificial limits on what magic can or cannot do, which position I completely agree with. Because hey, it's Magic. It's not free, it takes real time and effort, but the whole point of magic is that if you have enough strength and cunning, anything is possible.I was primarily disagreeing with dismissing the DW-Fenspace connection out of hand. The connection is canon, to the point that if we want to dump it, we have to dump LOGG, some of Stellvia's backstory, and the Catalogue itself -- which makes the impact of DW on magic in Fenspace utterly moot.
But yes, I was also objecting to hard-and-fast -- but worse, utterly arbitrary -- rules of what can and can't be allowed. The point of the UTM is that possible/impossible is mainly defined by the model you use to access magic, not by magic itself. One thing that maybe I should add to descriptions of the UTM, though, is that there's something like a fusion of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at play with magic -- you can't make a system that's all possible and no impossible. You must have tradeoffs somewhere -- phenomenal cosmic power, but itty-bitty living space.
On the resurrection issue, remember that the greater metacontinuum also includes at least one Buffyverse, where it's possible to use a magical ritual to yank a soul out of the afterlife and shove it back into its body months and even years after death... By extension, with the right system, that should be possible in Fenspace as well.
(Unrelated to nothing else: No one got the Thomas Dolby joke in my last post in this thread? I'm going to go sob in a corner now. )
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.