Part of the the fun of planning fiction is getting to think about the tropes in the genre you’re working in and decide how you want to make them your own. One of the tropes of fantasy, which finds it’s way into LoTR, Harry Potter, Narnia, Dark Crystal, Black Cauldron, heck even The Magicians, is that technology and electronics cannot exist in the magical world or magical part of the world because either 1.) it’s set in medieval England for some reason or 2.) if modern day, electronics don’t work properly around too much magic. This minor detail has a huge impact on world building in fantasy, and I realized, even when it’s done meta-super-self-consciously like in The Magicians, it’s basically an excuse for the magical world to be a pre-industrial fantasy where everything is clear cut and “as it should be” because it’s still basically Feudalism*1. Capital is made to be evil, but not because it exploits the worker and the land, but rather because, in it’s early stages at least, it brings with it a tendency for progressive social change and a breakdown of certainty about classes and roles*2. Boo hoo.

It’s romantic and kind of regressive, as much as I totally love it as a reader. Like, I love castles. And magic swords. I need more of both in my life. But I’m writing this part right now that takes place modern day, and my magical rhelm is supposed to have all this control over the earth rhelm, so obviously they’d love surveilence technology and stuff. So now I’m trying to write magic and technology as two equally powerful resources that are only as moral or functional as whoever wields them, and I hope what I write turns out not to be a pile of crap, because the idea excites me…

…and makes me want to re-watch those early episodes of Buffy with Jenny “Techno-Pagan” Calendar because yes please.

*1 - Have you ever been reading Harry Potter and then suddenly wondered where everyone in the wizarding world got all their food and money and stuff? Like, Malfoy Manor is not exactly a cottage industry production house of everything Draco has, so then you’re like oh yeah house elves are a metaphor for real surfs, servants, and slaves, but making them another species makes it seem more like animal abuse than the icky problem and more immediately alarming issue of human servitude.

*2 - The capitalism we know today is another dissertation altogether.

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