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Mar. 11th, 2021 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI've finally managed to push past the first episode of The Magicians and have watched most of the first season. I think it's one of those shows that's probably enjoyable considered on its own, but if you've read the books it's liable to get on your nerves. That's probably especially true if you've spent a lot of time and thought imposing a particular, limited reading onto the books. *coughcough*
I've spent a lot of time screaming at the show "Where's all the pedagogy meta!?!" I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it's quite likely that the pedagogy meta is more important in the version of the books I have constructed in my head than in the actual books, but I do think that the show is less interested in pedagogy meta than the books are.
So much of the meat of Grossman's Brakebills passages is in establishing how magic works and how it is taught. The two go hand in hand- the genius of this as a storytelling device is that as Quentin learns, we learn too. It is both a worldbuilding mechanism and a character development tool. Grossman's magic is a combination of the numinous and the mechanical, which is my favorite kind of magic. So much of the Brakebills education consists of rote drilling of magical procedures- hand motions, ingredient dilutions, arrangements of sigils. And yet there is bigger magic that is not contained in these rotes, there is room for creativity, and room for the magic to fight back. Magic is a chaotic system. I have discussed several times the way this resembles my engineering education, substituting magical hand motions for beam analysis problem sets.
The Brakebills South episode of the show doesn't work for me because of the lack of setup. In the first book, Grossman spends a lot of time developing the idea of basic, student level spells that must be adapted for Circumstances, major and minor. This culminates in Brakebills South, where the characters find themselves emotionally broken down in order be built back up as magicians who have an understanding of magic that is deeper than just explaining what the textbooks say. In the show, characters talk about Circumstances as part of the technobabble of discussing spells, but the broader theory of Circumstances is never brought up, so when we have an episode where all the characters do is sit in tiny rooms in Antarctica and repeat the same spell over and over again with different Circumstances, the meaning behind their actions is, presumably, somewhat unclear to people who haven't read the books, and for me, unsatisfyingly shallow. Needless to say, this is not helped by the fact that the writers, realizing that of course watching Our Heroes magically put nails into boards again and again is bad television, barely show it at all. But that repetition is the whole point of the exercise, so minimizing it minimizes the emotional impact. Sometimes Magic is Bad Television, was Grossman's point. The TV show is not interested in engaging with this. In the show, Brakebills South is entirely about the development of Quentin's relationship with Alice, and Penny's relationship with Kady. Which are things Grossman accomplished, but he also managed at the same time to tell stories about Quentin and Alice and Josh and Eliot and Janet learning about themselves and learning about magic, and the TV show doesn't reach that.
This paradoxically puts the show in an opposite bind with respect to Julia's plot. There are passages where Grossman skims through Julia learning from hedges in safe houses around the country. He's already built the foundation of how magic works in the first book, so all he needs to do in The Magician King is demonstrate one time how limited the hedges' ability to adapt to Circumstances is, how their spells are sketchy step by step instructions without the underlying Theory of Magic that Brakebills drills into its students, and he can move on to what's interesting about Julia's education. But while the show happily races through the Brakebills plotlines it needs to get Quentin and company powerful enough to encounter Fillory (which is way more interesting to the show than pedagogy meta, for inexplicable reasons), it doesn't want to move Julia's plot along that fast, so we see episode after episode of her messing around with spells in safe houses... except the writers' disinterest in pedagogy and in Grossman's mechanics of magic means that these scenes are all the fucking same thing over and over again. I appreciate why Julia's story was merged into Season 1, it inherently makes Quentin more interesting to set him against Julia, but the disinclination to make The Magicians be a show about learning magic in school and out of school (which is precisely the only part of the books I care about) works against it.
But I have been told in Season 3 Jews dance so I will hold out at least that far.
I've spent a lot of time screaming at the show "Where's all the pedagogy meta!?!" I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it's quite likely that the pedagogy meta is more important in the version of the books I have constructed in my head than in the actual books, but I do think that the show is less interested in pedagogy meta than the books are.
So much of the meat of Grossman's Brakebills passages is in establishing how magic works and how it is taught. The two go hand in hand- the genius of this as a storytelling device is that as Quentin learns, we learn too. It is both a worldbuilding mechanism and a character development tool. Grossman's magic is a combination of the numinous and the mechanical, which is my favorite kind of magic. So much of the Brakebills education consists of rote drilling of magical procedures- hand motions, ingredient dilutions, arrangements of sigils. And yet there is bigger magic that is not contained in these rotes, there is room for creativity, and room for the magic to fight back. Magic is a chaotic system. I have discussed several times the way this resembles my engineering education, substituting magical hand motions for beam analysis problem sets.
The Brakebills South episode of the show doesn't work for me because of the lack of setup. In the first book, Grossman spends a lot of time developing the idea of basic, student level spells that must be adapted for Circumstances, major and minor. This culminates in Brakebills South, where the characters find themselves emotionally broken down in order be built back up as magicians who have an understanding of magic that is deeper than just explaining what the textbooks say. In the show, characters talk about Circumstances as part of the technobabble of discussing spells, but the broader theory of Circumstances is never brought up, so when we have an episode where all the characters do is sit in tiny rooms in Antarctica and repeat the same spell over and over again with different Circumstances, the meaning behind their actions is, presumably, somewhat unclear to people who haven't read the books, and for me, unsatisfyingly shallow. Needless to say, this is not helped by the fact that the writers, realizing that of course watching Our Heroes magically put nails into boards again and again is bad television, barely show it at all. But that repetition is the whole point of the exercise, so minimizing it minimizes the emotional impact. Sometimes Magic is Bad Television, was Grossman's point. The TV show is not interested in engaging with this. In the show, Brakebills South is entirely about the development of Quentin's relationship with Alice, and Penny's relationship with Kady. Which are things Grossman accomplished, but he also managed at the same time to tell stories about Quentin and Alice and Josh and Eliot and Janet learning about themselves and learning about magic, and the TV show doesn't reach that.
This paradoxically puts the show in an opposite bind with respect to Julia's plot. There are passages where Grossman skims through Julia learning from hedges in safe houses around the country. He's already built the foundation of how magic works in the first book, so all he needs to do in The Magician King is demonstrate one time how limited the hedges' ability to adapt to Circumstances is, how their spells are sketchy step by step instructions without the underlying Theory of Magic that Brakebills drills into its students, and he can move on to what's interesting about Julia's education. But while the show happily races through the Brakebills plotlines it needs to get Quentin and company powerful enough to encounter Fillory (which is way more interesting to the show than pedagogy meta, for inexplicable reasons), it doesn't want to move Julia's plot along that fast, so we see episode after episode of her messing around with spells in safe houses... except the writers' disinterest in pedagogy and in Grossman's mechanics of magic means that these scenes are all the fucking same thing over and over again. I appreciate why Julia's story was merged into Season 1, it inherently makes Quentin more interesting to set him against Julia, but the disinclination to make The Magicians be a show about learning magic in school and out of school (which is precisely the only part of the books I care about) works against it.
But I have been told in Season 3 Jews dance so I will hold out at least that far.