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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7751460" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Or a giant's strength, or a dragon's ability to fly. So clearly there are things which are both fantastic (that is, belonging to fantasy) and not magic (that is belonging to a category of things where a person can will to bring into being things that wouldn't have otherwise happened, or belonging to a category of powers which provide some external or supernatural exception to the rules).</p><p></p><p>Which is as much to say that a thing can be truly fantastic and yet not also be magic. This is extremely common in comic books, where beings like Spiderman or Captain America have fantastic abilities and yet those abilities are expressedly not magic. Even abilities as fantastic as those of Superman are not deemed magical in the comic books, and indeed it is a trope of the story that Superman is so unmagical, that he is in fact very vulnerable to the powers of magic compared to his invulnerability to mundane powers. </p><p></p><p>What's interesting and important is that this is also especially true of myth and fantasy. Some one like Heracles is not magically strong in the sense that we usually mean by magic. He was born with it. It was inherently a part of his being. The same is true of Celtic or Vedic heroes. They have fantastic abilities to smite things without it necessarily being magic. A being might know magic - Odin quests for the knowledge of it - while being fantastic for reasons other than magic. Tarzan is able to do any number of unrealistic and fantastic things, with no appeal to magic whatsoever. Rather, Tarzan has legendary skills that give him the ability to do things that to ordinary people seem magical.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7751460, member: 4937"] Or a giant's strength, or a dragon's ability to fly. So clearly there are things which are both fantastic (that is, belonging to fantasy) and not magic (that is belonging to a category of things where a person can will to bring into being things that wouldn't have otherwise happened, or belonging to a category of powers which provide some external or supernatural exception to the rules). Which is as much to say that a thing can be truly fantastic and yet not also be magic. This is extremely common in comic books, where beings like Spiderman or Captain America have fantastic abilities and yet those abilities are expressedly not magic. Even abilities as fantastic as those of Superman are not deemed magical in the comic books, and indeed it is a trope of the story that Superman is so unmagical, that he is in fact very vulnerable to the powers of magic compared to his invulnerability to mundane powers. What's interesting and important is that this is also especially true of myth and fantasy. Some one like Heracles is not magically strong in the sense that we usually mean by magic. He was born with it. It was inherently a part of his being. The same is true of Celtic or Vedic heroes. They have fantastic abilities to smite things without it necessarily being magic. A being might know magic - Odin quests for the knowledge of it - while being fantastic for reasons other than magic. Tarzan is able to do any number of unrealistic and fantastic things, with no appeal to magic whatsoever. Rather, Tarzan has legendary skills that give him the ability to do things that to ordinary people seem magical. [/QUOTE]
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