How To Fail At Magic — Dr Strange 2

Doctor Strange 2 has the worst magic I have ever seen in a movie it's as if the creators had a list of all of the rules all of the collective wisdom around how to write magic well and then actively went against all of it so I thought let's scrap that video on magic systems I was planning and instead use those notes to critique Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a film that when it comes to Magic did everything wrong uh so much so in breaking it down I'll have to cover all of the bases on what makes magic good or bad in a story and by seeing how that lines up with the Multiverse of Madness we can realize what happens when you break each individual Rule and of course in the end I'll be getting constructive and be suggesting a fix for how this movie with just a few tweaks could have been given a vastly superior magic system welcome to how to fail at Magic and let's begin it all with part one explore before you expand there is a universal piece of advice that applies to not just magic but storytelling in general deeper is better than wider because what would you prefer in a story to have over 1 000 alien species in your Space Opera let's say where 99 of the species shown are never explored in any detail or to instead have only five species in your fantasy let's say but each one is greatly fleshed out with their biology and culture and religions and the way these species all interact with each other filled in with tremendous detail personally I'd argue the latter is far more conducive towards a rich compelling story world than the former this really is one of those Universal guidelines and it applies everywhere in storytelling if you're dealing with a character's flaw expand upon that flaw's ramifications in the story and reasons for existing before you give them a second floor and if you're dealing with magic it is better to have one spell that is considered with Incredible depth than it is to have 30 spells all of which are given only the most shallow of Explorations and I am sure you can tell where this one's going because that latter approach is exactly what Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Falls for so the author Brandon Sanderson has contributed a lot towards the general wisdom on making magic work well in writing we'll be referencing back to him quite a few times in this video essay but in one of his lectures he says this um let's go to sanderson's third law go deeper into a magic instead of wire and this is one that Hollywood has a lot of trouble with I find that a magic system that you have explored deeply in an interesting way is far superior to a large number of things considering the ramifications of what you already have is worth doing instead of creating something new in storytelling the audience yearns to see an exploration of the ideas you've introduced far more than they yearn for wholly new Concepts to be added in and the more you explore a Magic's applications and ramifications on the world that is when good magic becomes great to realize what happens when you fail at this let's look at the now Infamous Illuminati scene and the entire thing revolves around what Wanda did to Black Bolt's mouth for those of you who haven't seen the film Wanda is massacring everyone she comes across and to stop her Mr Fantastic warns wonder that if she doesn't give it up Black Bolt will speak at her with his power and she'll die and so then without lifting a finger purely using her mind she transforms the Flesh of black Bolt's mouth to be sealed over and from there he suffers a rather grisly death um now what Wanda did here was to be fair quite cool admittedly a great deal around it induced a lot of head scratching such as Reed Richards the smartest man alive being stupid enough to not just waste a surprise Advantage but then tell the Baddie exactly who their strongest member is and how you can defeat them but all right the actual moment itself of Black Bolt dying if you ignore all of the sloppy character work around it the method of death itself is to be fair quite cool I for one am partial to creative gruesome Death Scenes however there is a terrible problem this death creates because Wanda did this without waving her hands her eyes didn't even blow she didn't make any gesture with her body whatsoever giving these guys no chance to react she merely fought it and the Flesh of his face was permanently warped by her thoughts alone and the implications of this are incredible I cannot stress how ridiculously overpowered this is because this is this is a god-tier level power Thanos what are you doing get out of here move over you are nothing compared to the Scarlet Witch because if you have ability alone you could merely think it and warp the bones in someone's spine permanently paralyzing them from the waist down or you could reach into their brain stem and instantly kill them with a thought if you had just this power you would be one of the most powerful super villains ever depicted on screen as all you have to do is merely look at Thor merely look at the Hulk mid Rampage merely look at Thanos and you could insta kill them with a thought this brings to question why she never employed this terrifying power against Dr Strange at any point in the movie but that is something we'll cover in part two later on but this is not to mention the thousands of really weird interesting and freaky ways in which they're going to explore this power going on I'm sure because maybe Wonder can oh oh oh never mind it seems the creators have forgotten they've given her this god-tier power entirely and we're not only not seeing any exploration of it we're also never going to see it used again yes this moment is cool very good very shocking very gruesome me likey but from a magic point of view in terms of weaving together a satisfying cohesive story with a strong internal consistency it's a travesty because you just gave Wonder a god-tier level power the ability to mold the bodies of other people with just a thought meaning your enemies can do nothing to see your attacks coming and it was never expanded upon but sadly violating this core tentative good storytelling is a running theme throughout this movie in every other scene they give her a totally new unforeshadowed power a terrifying power which has terrible implications only then they make the far more terrible mistake of never exploring said power with any level of depth what's this Wanda is stuck behind a blast door a quick give her the ability to teleport using the Shadows what's this wonder is emerging from the mirror Dimension uh quick give her a healing factor that would make Wolverine envious as she heals back broken bones and gashes in her face who cares if this is completely unnecessary completely over the top and not needed to be in the story and also who cares that this very healing factor is forgotten about later in the movie when she gets hurt and doesn't heal from it and I know there are a few people saying well it wasn't actually Wanda's body that got hurt therefore it makes sense that it didn't heal but like like how come she has some of her powers when she's like possessing another person but not all of her powers why is it she only gets some of her powers but not all of them like what what even are the rules behind this magic no one knows nobody knows I don't think even the creators knew what the rules were behind this magic yes her healing from coming out that Bloody gong makes for a cool moment but the problem lies and how the creators seem to think that as this is cool that's all that matters they paid no thought into designing a rich fun magic system where it all adds up and makes sense the only thing they cared about was creating cool moments on a scene-by-scene basis and the consequence is having magic not just as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle but also magic that is abound with inconsistency yes being cool matters of course it does to an extent but when you give the rule of cool priority over every everything else you do not get quality you instead get this this isn't something the MC was new to however introducing game-changing ideas but putting no effort into exploring them for example in the end of black panther when they say hey we're gonna share our culture and share our technology with the world we're going to come out and let everyone see what kind of how it truly is yeah they they didn't explore that idea whatsoever didn't they there was absolutely no exploration of the idea in any of the movies I'm just saying also one other one right or one massive pet peeve I've got and I'm pretty sure I'm the only guy on Earth who was annoyed by this one but it's still a massive it's still a massive pet peeve for me because in Infinity War when this happens where'd that come from it's nanotech you like it it really got to be here because Bruce is an accomplished scientist a very intelligent man so he would have absolutely responded here saying wait you invented nanotechnology uh yeah that's incredible this does for technology what the discovery of penicillin did for medicine this will revolutionize 3D printing oh we can use this for delicate surgery these Nano machines could even be a new way to fight cancer your invention of nanotechnology this is gonna change the course of human history you've indirectly saved millions of lives Tony wait you you have let everyone know about this right well there's a cop that's a complicated question bills you just invented the single greatest leap in technology since the internet and you use it for nothing more than to make another [ __ ] suit well kinda you win the Nobel Prize for this three times over this will revolutionize Society in thousands of ways you just invented a potential cure for cancer and you didn't let anyone know if we get killed today no one will ever know you made this this invention might be lost forever well when you put it like that sure it sounds bad but I can't believe you've done this Tony I knew you had an ego and the Iron Man suits one thing but this hugging the scientific discovery of the century just for yourself this this is pure evil I can't believe you've done this Tony look try not to think too hard about this one Bros it it's not like the writers did I would like to end that skit with a profound apology to all of my American viewers for appropriating their accent so terribly but while I have been stressing that you should explore before you expand this does not mean you must have a small world because you can totally create a sprawling Universe filled with all sorts of magic and cultures and Fantastical creatures it's just if you go down that path you've really got to work your socks off to make a world like Middle Earth work but if you pull that off you have a story that is captivatingly rich in ways that a small-scale world could never be the Lord of the Rings really is a masterpiece in more ways than one here and if you want to check it out so you can indulge in Middle Earth and learn how to World build like Tolkien while you're at it you can listen to The Fellowship of the Ring on the house today through audible the sponsor of today's video The Fellowship of the Ring is a brilliant audiobook and I think a Rob inglis's narration just enriches the whole story it's very well read and if you've never checked out the Fellowship of the Ring novel before now is a fantastic chance to as to celebrate the rings of powers release you can click my link in the description or text lotr to 500 500 and you'll get a credit you can use to grab the Fellowship of the Ring and once you do it's yours to keep forever plus you'll also get a 30-day membership which has literally hundreds of free audio books you can listen to once you're done with the fellowship audible is the main sponsor of my channel because I use them daily I'll listen while walking the dogs using the gym or generally just playing games I find it a brilliant way to read more and make no sacrifices in terms of how I spend my time and you'll realize that for yourself if you click my link in the description or text lotr to 500 500 use that credit and grab the Fellowship of the Ring for free on Audible today but cutting back to it that Illuminati scene from a magic point of view it does not work well so let's compare it to another scene in fiction where magic was used in all the right ways let's look at magnito's prison escape in X-Men 2. so Magneto has been kept in a purely plastic prison cell all guards need to go through a metal detector in order to get in they use plastic truncheons and this means he's totally powerless but in this scene due to a little injection a guard received the night before from Mystique Magneto manages to lift the guard in the air before saying and then he rips out the meager amount of metal in his body and massacres everyone on his way out like this is a great scene it's a wonderful scene not just because it's a very badass but also because it's playing into all of the things that makes great magic great he had a major limitation to his power which his captors exploited to its fullest limitations by the way we'll be discussing later in the video but yet here's the creative solution because the human body has Trace Amounts of metal in it anyway so you could using comic book logic at least inject a bunch of it into someone and it wouldn't instantly kill them and you could then use them as a mule for sneaking it past a metal detector as a means of bringing that metal to Magneto it's a very creative way to play around with the villain's Powers making for a wonderful scene and also what's very relevant here instead of the Wonder approach of having 30 different powers Magneto has just the one as a consequence of this when Magneto lifts the guard in the air it's such a cathartic moment it's so satisfying because we're seeing his powers used in unexpected ways yet ways that also make total sense to us it's a very intuitive exploration of what's been set up meanwhile with wonder when she seals black vault's mouth because she's using a power we have never seen her use before it doesn't land anywhere near as well from a magic point of view when Christine tries to let America out of her cell but she can't because Wanda has suddenly developed electromagnetic fields that interfere with computers it is the opposite of satisfying in fact it feels a hell of a lot like the writers were in a corner didn't know how to justify America not to be able to escape so gave Wonder a totally new power just to solve that problem in that specific scene and this is something that the writers did far more than once in this movie are the same can be said for when Doctor Strange tries to cast a portal in kamutaj and Wanda atomizes his sling ring despite her not only not being in the same room but not even being in the same Dimension to him but this is all sadly a running theme in the MCU Doctor Strange 2 is not the only film falling for this problem they keep giving characters all kinds of powers but very rarely apply those powers in the creative ways they really should be I mean for one when Thanos has The Infinity Gauntlet there were so many insanely creative ways you could have applied that power at what if in the middle of the end game fight Thanos has got hold of some of the stones and Thor drops his hammer onto thanos's chest in the same way he did for Loki in Thor 1 and Thanos uses the Power Stone to make him the strongest being in all creation but even then he can not lift the hammer but then just when Thor looks all smug Thanos switches to using the reality Stone and he turns off gravity causing everything to float it's a basic principle The Hammer has an infinite Mass you can't lift it no matter how strong you are however weight is determined by mass times gravity so if you turned off the gravity it no longer has any weight without gravity anyone can lift Thor's hammer and then he uses it to clobber Thor in the face now those are the kinds of moments in storytelling when magic is at its best when established rules are applied and exploited in highly creative ways now we could have had Thanos do exactly that in end game and the fans would have gone nuts for it that the reaction from everyone would have been crazy or he could have used the stones in a myriad of other in insanely cool creative ways as they interact with the other magic systems those being the other superheroes Powers instead all he does is punch people and blast them with beams of energy you just gave Thanos an Infinity of possibility the ability to slow down time the ability to rewind time entirely the ability to turn off Gravity by altering reality and you picked the most boring uncreative option possible by having him just punch them extra hard and making a laser beam it's such a waste of such a chance to do something so cool with your magic but all right I'm gonna do this right now for Marvel I'm going to take a piece of magic in Doctor Strange 2 and thoroughly explore its potential ramifications and applications in the way any writer should if they're writing magic let's look at the sling rings at the the thing is if you properly think through this tool you'll quickly realize how if you had just a sling ring and that by itself that is not just useful magic that power alone would turn someone into a terrifying opponent it's more than just the ability to teleport it gives you so many powers and tactical options it's not even funny uh firstly you are now immune from all full damage as you can just cast it below yourself and what are you thinking don't cast it like that you're a veteran sorcerer you should know better instead cast it so the exit portal is sending you up towards the sky and from there when you go up just as you're at the apogee of your Arc cast a portal directly beneath your feet so you can then land on the road in a nice clean stop you would think that if someone were these sorcerer Supreme the most knowledgeable and experienced sorcerer on Earth someone who's been at this for longer than Doctor Strange they would at least know how to use a sorcerer's staple tool properly or screw All That cast the portal so you're yeating yourself over the big demon you're fighting and if you time things well enough and you're fast enough with your fingers you can stay in the air arcing from portal to portal forever theoretically giving you the incredible advantage of being able to hit your enemy from high up with other kinds of blasts and because you're so high up in the air there is nothing they can do to hurt you while you rain down hell upon them a sling ring is extra portable you can smuggle one in your pocket very easily so why not have three of them for backup Doctor Strange they're so useful small and evidently kind of fragile you'd be a fool to not carry at least one as a spare forget vibranium a sling ring is to Captain America's shield what a modern day artillery truck is to a cannon from 1257 A.D it is not just unbreakable as a shield it's simultaneously reflects all attacks back at the one attacking you do that to wander and her exploding blast in the temple Siege dead you'd think that if there were 300 Sorcerers all of whom have sling Rings one of them just one of them would have had the thought to maybe reflect wonders attack wonders exploding blasts back at her in the temple Siege if they had done that she'd be dead you can cast one portal ahead of you on a wall the other high in the sky looking down and doing that in a kind of mind-bending way you can get a bird's eye view over anywhere this being a wonderful way to gather intelligence hashtag Wheel of Time you can of course cast it above enemies and allow your allies to instantly close the distance leaping onto them for a sneaky stab in the back do that when wander is hovering around the temple suddenly someone stabbed their spear through through her heart dead you can instead just create a portal next to wonder where the other end goes into space and because there's a vacuum she'll get sucked right up like dust into a Hoover whereupon she will instantly suffocate and die dead a sling ring is not just a direct upgrade from Captain America shield it is also a direct upgrade from a lightsaber because with a lightsaber it's a close range weapon unless you're very skilled with the force in which case you can throw it but with a sling ring if they're 20 meters away all you have to do is cast a sweeping portal as Thor Ragnarok demonstrated is possible then just close it off at the right moment and suddenly you chopped off the Scarlet Witch's legs are by the thighs and she's now screaming at the top of her lungs dying from blood loss dead a sling ring alone is such a formidable weapon if you took just one person very well versed in in its use and put them up against Thanos at full strength they could decapitate him with just a wave of their fingers like why have weapons like milnier why have Iron Man suits and Captain America Shields and all those fancy abilities when one overweight factory worker suffering from asthma called Dave but has a sling ring could in theory twiddle his fingers and cut the almighty Scarlet witch in Twain in one second flat I appreciate that I am absolutely [ __ ] over the way magic has been handled in the MCU and that is precisely the point because this is what it looks like when you stop and actually think through how magic works in your world like seriously this is a very obvious intuitive expansion upon the magic system you can cast sling rings from all corners of the world over what if you simply cast one end by your enemy and the other into the vacuum of space where upon the get instantly sucked in and then you can just close the portal behind them that's a hell of an easy way to win any and all fights and there is absolutely nothing proposed in the movies that say this couldn't be done quite simply sling Rings really are two op they should have never been allowed to be as terrifying a threat as they currently are the answer to all of this is really quite simple they should have thought things through long before ever introducing this power to ensure that while it is very cool there are also many things portals can't do perhaps in Doctor Strange One have a throwaway line saying that slingerings can only be cast close to the ground so there is no casting them 10 miles upper in the depths of space now that problem has been entirely solved by just throwing in one line of dialogue you can have it so in Infinity War Wong never slices off that goon's hand doing that was a bigger mistake because it introduced a rather terrifying power slingerings have the ability to do so why I not have it so Wong tries to close the portal on him but we see that portals are incapable of closing so long as there's an object obstructing the hole and then the big guy grabs the edges of the portal and is forcing it back open with both his hands as he's coming back through now Spider-Man or someone else has to punch the guy back to the other side and it introduces a cool limitation to the magic now sling Rings can't actually damage anything not directly they can only be used strictly for teleportation now with these changes I'd argue slingerings are much more balanced in a fight but even then are still absurdly useful if the user is creative enough but in terms of how the magic stands there are so many moments where people make the entirely wrong choices but that leads us quite snugly into another ramification of poorly thinking through how magic works in your story and on this front Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the ultimate cautionary tale let's cover it in part two why don't they just a terrible consequence of giving a character such as Wonder a huge arsenal of spells the ability to seal people's mouths the ability to teleport and so on is that the more you do this you'll find the risk of an inconsistency or an outright plot hole happening goes up exponentially I love the Lord of the Rings films that they're the best fantasy movies ever made and when Gandalf heats up Aragorn's sword in film 2 so he drops it it's a fun scene 10 out of 10. but the problem this scene has is you've just introduced the fact that Gandalf can heat up the weapons people are holding forcing them to drop them a very useful spell so why does he never use it again at any point in the trilogy I mean when they're fighting those Orcs in me nastirith and they nearly kill him it would have come in really quite handy then wouldn't it and the answer you may give to that nitpick as well if you see a story which has one tiny lapse in very similar shoes and you use that lone nitpick as an excuse to hate on that story the problem does not lie in the story The problem lies in you for being so petty for getting so upset about such a tiny thing and fair enough frankly but this critique does still stand it still holds water for this is one of those universal laws around magic for those of you who don't know in order to understand this next bit a soft magic system as decreed by our Lord and savior Brando Sando praise be praised me is when the way in which a magic works are not firmly defined that the rules are ambiguous non-existent basically but meanwhile a hard magic system is where its mechanics and rules are very well defined both systems have their time to shine in storytelling neither is inherently objectively better than the others however it is irrelevant if you're writing a hard or soft system in this case because if a character uses an ability once the audience will be endlessly thinking man that was a really useful spell so why did they not use it again here regardless of whether it's a soft or hard system the audience will ask that dreaded question why don't they just and if you as a writer want to avoid the audience asking that question and in doing so ensure they remain nice and immersed you can do two things either come up with a good justification as to why they can't use that specific spell at this point or simply never give them that ability in the first place when you do neither of these things some of your audience will be asking why didn't Gandalf hit up the orc swords in that final battle why didn't Doctor Strange use that incredibly useful multiplication spell he used on Thanos on wonder but at the end of the day those two examples really are nitpicks they really are I don't think there's a single person alive who is watching Return of the King and was loving it a bit but then realized Gandalf wasn't using that one spell he used in film too so then they started vibrating with rage before leaving a one star review however when you tell a story where you dedicate no thought into the magic such as the Multiverse of Madness all of a sudden every scene is crammed full of these kinds of plot holes every scene is overshadowed and downright ruined for a good chunk of your audience because they are endlessly asking that dreaded question wait why don't they just and they're doing it at a rate of once per minute and the consequence is that large swathes of your audience are incapable of being immersed and they will see your story for the poorly considered very similitudeless construct that it is which is most definitely not a good thing the thing is I'm about to do that right now I'm about to interrogate and broke and prod at this film's logic asking why doesn't he just why doesn't she just and you will quickly realize this film has such a poorly considered magic system it's downright fascinating Wanda has the ability to psychically overpower Charles Xavier of all people and that is impressive stuff very impressive stuff but for some reason she never tries not wants to penetrate Doctor Strange's mind you'd think if she can dominate Professor X of all people at his own game she must therefore be one of the most powerful psychic beings in the Multiverse at the very least she is a more powerful psychic than Professor X so why does she never use this incredible psychic power on the three main characters as they run away because if she did the movie would be over if she can teleport using Reflections or the Shadows both of which he's been established to do why doesn't she teleport in front of them cutting off their escape when they're running in that tunnel there's a good reason why because if she did that the movie would be over another one Wanda can disintegrate people that's a pretty scary power very scary indeed she can literally tear you to ribbons with a wave of her hand and that is very powerful hats off they're very powerful power you've got there and when Wong has outlived his usefulness she decides to not disintegrate him but rather to toss him off a cliff when she wants him dead the problem is why use such a risky way of dispatching enemies because people in real life have been known to survive fools down mountains and let's not forget he made a portal to get here I know he said there was a radius where magic couldn't be used which is very interesting seeing as how he uses magic a good dozen times within that radius anyway but it is conceivable that the base of the cliff is far away enough for him to cast a portal and survive the fall so why not just incinerate him or blow his brain up like you did for Reed there is only one reason why she didn't do that very sensible thing because Wong had to be alive for the climax despite being given every reason to melt his brain she does not solely because the script says she is barred from acting with common sense let's also not forget that she confronts Dr Strange head-on in kamutaj and again in the tunnel and again in that pocket Dimension she could Shred him to bits like she did for read in any of those situations but she does not solely because the script says no that's the core of it if you give someone too many magical powers you effectively make them a God and the problem with that is if you don't handle such an all-powerful character very carefully they will stop feeling like a real person to your audience and will also feel like a puppet with your hand up their bum because they are so powerful can use their dozens of terrifying abilities in so many grisly ways but they never do because if they did if they displayed the intelligence of just an average person they would win instantly and so the villain needs to act in nonsensical ways otherwise there would be no story but here are some productive suggestions with the one problem there's three I can think of that solve this issue in the movie Choice a you simply have won the look at the dark hole distracted by its majesty and while her mind is elsewhere Wong uses the chance to escape and the nurse she sends one of the Golem goons after him and then we have a 30 second scene later where he dispatches the Golem on the top of one of the mountains there you go if that's a classic move that could have worked fine uh Choice B you give Wanda some kind of limitation to her magic you make it so she can disintegrate matter but it costs her a huge amount of energy to do it completely tires her out or uses some finite resource on her person so she chooses to throw Wong off the edge instead killing him in a way that uses far less energy that could have worked but option C and what is by far my favorite option just take away her ability to disintegrate people strip it away because it adds nothing to the story and she is powerful enough as is already I appreciate some people maybe getting a tad confrontational in the comments here some people saying just turn your brain off it's a movie it doesn't need to make sense and my response is no because what I like to think is a fairly reasonable request is I prefer characters to act like humans I prefer to have each character act as a real person would in any given situation because when you pull that off it bolsters immersion like nothing else and it allows me to get invested into their characters because they actually feel like real people instead of cardboard cutouts who are strictly banned from employing common sense at every conceivable turn in the story I just want my characters to feel like real people to have everything they do make sense is that really too much to ask the thing is I hate nitpicking on the closer look I really hate it okay I I don't hate it it's also a sort of guilty pleasure I try not to indulge in too much but I prefer to critique General things general rules being broken which we can all learn lessons from and frankly I'd argue that obsessing over all of the little nitpick Cinema sin style is an unhealthy way to break down stories but when it's at a point where in every scene every time your character is on screen there is always a new plot hole created something has gone horribly wrong with your story and in this case it's because they put far too little thought into having very similitude in their Universe they did not think the magic through and it came back to bite them hundreds of times over but there is a whole other aspect of good magic that this movie again fails to include and let's cover that in part three limitations Trump strengths if I had to pin it down I'd say creativity at the end of the day is really problem solving it's when you're presented with a difficult challenge that's when you come up with your most creative ideas and generally the more difficult the challenge the more constraints you have the more that forces you to stretch your imagination to think up Solutions if your character has 50 different powers like Wonder well you can just apply whichever one is needed in the situation like teleporting or popping people's heads like balloons or what have you failing that just invent a wholly new one on the Fly God knows that's what the writers did no real creativity is needed here however if your character has only one power and it's a power poorly suited for the task at hand that now means the writer and from the audience's perspective the character has to really stretch themselves thinking up wacky unforeseen in applications of their magic to solve this very challenging problem focusing on limitations over strengths in your magic system bolster's creativity and also these new limitations naturally lend themselves to a character struggling all the harder providing trickier obstacles for them and naturally the more a character struggles the more compelling their Journey let's look at telekinesis in the grand scheme of Magic the ability to grab anything and toss it around it's not very compelling partly because we've seen this power used hundreds of times in the exact same way but mainly because it's going against the real brand Sandy's second law of magic as he says himself flaws are more interesting than the powers themselves this is again a kind of core storytelling concept your story is generally going to revolve around what your characters have trouble doing around what the magic can't do rather than what it can the same goes your characters the story is about what they can't do or what is hard for them to do rather than about what they can do I suggest that you kind of keep this in the Forefront of your mind that flaws and limitations of magic are more interesting if you have Bogue standard telekinesis there are no limitations there you can grab any objects you like toss it in any direction you like and it never fatigues you or has any kind of cost you could Lop things around all day long if you liked and dare I say it such a power is a relatively boring one let's apply this rule of flaws being more interesting than strengths and see how we can make a more compelling magic system how about we change it so a character has telekinesis but can only control metal it is suddenly Leaps and Bounds more interesting than just generic telekinesis because now it has limitations now there are ways for people to abuse and exploit their weaknesses such as using plastic weapons or prison cells with no metal in sight you can imprison Magneto because the man has a critical weakness but you could never imprison wonder she is just too powerful she can teleport and body hop and rip doors down with a thought and also fly while she's at it she is impossible to contain and impossible to fight too because she has no limitations for you to exploit but with Magneto now you've effectively nerfed his magic the character has more opportunities to be creative with said magic because everything is harder for him and after all constraints breed creativity such as him throwing a knife before yanking it back or lifting a man in the air using the metal in his blood or controlling a man's hand goes by using his watch or ripping out a man's fillings as a torture technique this is good Magneto has a solid power set that lends itself well to telling a great story but we can take this further if you took this power of telekinesis and stripped it down even more where perhaps you can only affect metal and can only push it away from you and it costs a finite resource on your person one if you run out of said resource you can no longer use the magic it does depend on the kind of story you want to tell but I would argue such a limited magic system is way way more conducive to a great story as it now has tremendous limitations meaning the challenge for your characters is all the greater also meaning it's more conducive towards thinking up these cathartic moments where magic is used in unforeseen ways that get around and exploit quirks in the system you could use this power to blast coins out before you like you're a human shotgun you can use it to stop bullets you can push against metal beneath you and that would allow you to do some very powerful jumps jumps where if you're not careful you might fall and splat in ground maybe you could try pushing metal structures over but be careful because maybe you'll be the one who moves and while the structure doesn't budge you'll go splatting into a wall this is a magic system that our Lord and savior so writes a lot Sanderson used himself in his mistborn Trilogy and it was a very limited system that was given a great deal of creative exploration and if you want to check out miss ball and see what a story looks like when it has great magic you could always click my link in the description and grab the audiobook for free on Audible but when you look at Doctor Strange 2 there is no weakness Wanda has that they can exploit there is no terrible cost America pays every time she hops to another Universe her only limitation is that she hasn't mastered control over when she can create the portals which doesn't feel like it's enough if you ask me and Doctor Strange himself to a weaker extent falls into the same ballpark as Wonder because he has a huge number of spells an exhaustive number of spells and not only does he very rarely apply them creatively said spells the applications their costs their negative ramifications are hardly ever explored but ramble over let's get constructive how could this movie of being improved let's cover that in part four a better magic system so what can we do to improve the Magic in this story well first off what we got to do before anything else is strip it down a Wonder can teleport and has telekinesis and has mind control and 20 other abilities and it's all too much here's what we do keep the powers Wonder shown in other stories fair enough you can't really change them seeing as we've already seen them but what we do is see the dark hold grants a very specific extra kind of power there is one thing the dark hole does and this one power she uses to devastating effect throughout the whole story now I'm not rewriting the whole movie today only the magic system because that is the focus of this video but what I feel could work really well is if that first bit of the movie things are all pretty much the same they fight the big old squid are all in the strange sit the girl down and while Wong takes her to the temple Doctor Strange goes to wonder and they can have a nice chat where he recruits her then brings her back to carmutage too the there is no contrived slip of the tongue before this point revealing her villainy however he does get a glimpse of her fingers and he sees they're all black and it baffles him so they're at the temple and suddenly a big monster just like the one from the prologue attacks and while all the sorcerers are holding up a shield to keep the monster out Wanda is seeking out America and Doctor Strange is with Wong strange brings up Wanda's fingers being black to wand and he tells stranger that it's The Telltale giveaway that someone's been using the dark hold to use it rots the body and we learn from Wong here in voiceover that the dark hole perverts all living things using it one can manipulate living matter and that manifests itself in many ways they can grab someone by the head and in doing so seize control over their limbic system turning them into a Mindless thrall under her command who does everything she says and as Wong says this we see Wonder doing this to the sorcerers within the temple working her way towards America visibly displaying her powers while Wong explains them in voice over recruiting more and more to her Army and Wong also says it's been known to create terrifying monsters they can take organic matter and congeal it and warp it into these horrifying Abominations of life and strange says just like that thing outside right now and together they realize how Wonder deceived them and run to fight her Wonder can't create stuff out of thin air but she can manipulate existing organic tissue a good writer and let's be honest a fairly morbid writer could take just that power alone and apply it in hundreds of wonderfully depraved ways how about she can't touch metal in plastic but if she hits a living thing with her energy blasts she can atomize them now that's great because that's the limitation Doctor Strange can use his cloak as a shield now as it stops her Blast from doing any damage but if the blast so much has touched your skin she'll turn you to Ash maybe when they hop around universes someone has a suit of Iron Man armor and it actually renders them immune to Wanda's attacks because there is no Exposed Skin there is nothing for her to latch onto and this person gives Wonder a serious run for her money because they're directly exploiting a limitation of her magic and also now we've narrowed our sight establishing that the thing the dark hole allows Mastery over is living matter now when she uses that very power to seal black Bolt's mouth it lands with way more of a punch and as a story beat it's a direct upgrade because instead of it being the tenth bit of magic they've made up on the spot it's now a creative application of a power that's already been a established so how about in that Illuminati fight she doesn't just seal black Bolt's mouth she also turns off his vocal cords meaning he's totally useless so she fights all of the superheroes and has a very hard time of it but then now Black Bolt is declawed she grabs him by the head turning him into her loyal goon and then she reactivates his voice and he fights for her this being the turning point of the fight where before here they were kicking her ass and now she starts killing them all one by one with black bolts help oh also also what will be very cool is the more you use the dark hold the more it corrupts you and converts you into Undead so we see it start with her hands then progress to her face as wondrous gradually looking more and more like a zombie as the film goes on getting corrupted by this evil power that's a fun cost we can throw in too it also feels like it would fit in her quite snugly with style too but Wonder being able to possess alternate versions of ourselves in other universes really is essential in order to have the plot we want to have so we got to keep that in but what we do is say the dark cold grants these two separate powers and they are two separate powers and the thing is throughout the whole movie one has been menacing strange and he's been purely on the defensive because with her new powers she's just too much for him to handle and so now when Doctor Strange possesses the stranger's corpse in the climax and she blasts him with her powers the audience gets all terrified thinking she's killed him and she's won the movie but nothing happens her Blast has absolutely no effect because he's dead not living and he is therefore immuned her spells in the climax before this point in the story she's been owning him the whole time and he's been purely on the defensive but in the climax he uses the established powers in a creative way to exploit her weaknesses and level the playing field by possessing a corpse something her magic has no power over if you gave that moment the proper execution it would be so powerful and cathartic as it exploits the limitations of her power in such a creative way notice how by greatly simplifying things by giving her only one kind of power instead of 20 her magic is now more compelling it's now being used in more interesting ways also she's now struggling more in her fights due to being weaker which again I'd argue makes for better fight scenes and a better overall story routinely great magic systems are about Simplicity for all you writers out there try to identify a simple easy to grasp core concept around how all the magic works and thoroughly explore its ramifications and just as importantly its limitations only once you've done that should you start to think what other bits of magic you want to add in as well but if you want to carry on the conversation don't bother with making a comment because I've got a Discord server Geared for writers and we talk about you know our characters and we Workshop ideas and always as well as all the movies we like anyway I'm on This Server every day so if you want to talk about this video ask me questions and frankly just discuss any writing related issue you're dealing with me and my growing community of writers would love to have you on our server and there is a link Down Below in the description also if you haven't checked out audible already I really do recommend you give their site a go I genuinely use Audible daily because it's just so useful to me and you can find a link for that in the description too but anyway thanks for watching keep writing and I'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 1,660,836

Keywords: dr strange, strange, dr strange 2, multiverse, dr strange in the multiverse of madness, multiverse of madness, wanda, scarlet witch, sam raimi, the closer look, closer look, the closer, marvel, MCU, video, essay, video essay, review, writing, how to, magic, how to write magic, magic systems, magic system, brandon sanderson

Id: KoO3iiYHQC8

Length: 51min 45sec (3105 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022