Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.
Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says “There’s no consensus about the origins of skydoves” when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that’s uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they’re an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT’S AN OPEN ISSUE.
Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won’t work, and you can’t call it a “theoretical exercise” just to cover up the fact that you’ve not been able to cast it. You can’t combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that’s just not how magic works, in all due respect.
Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.
Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.
Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student… You keep getting called to go on “quests” which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor’s project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor’s project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.
Pal. Am I ever writing a book for you, and I’m just highly chuffed right now because I thought I was the only nerd that would think this was cool. Will it ever be published? I don’t know, I write for a hobby, between scrambling to exist.
But damn, I’m pretty much writing this theme, though not the exacts you posted. The protagonist is a snitty little trans dude that would certainly have a Tumblr blog pointing out magical inaccuracies in media if Tumblr was a thing that existed for him. His character arc is realizing that being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t really matter if you’re insufferable and no. The real magic is when he grows his own personality, starts caring about others, and stops being such a brat because he knows a bunch of 10-dollar words that no one ever cared about in the first place.
He actually specializes in magic archaeology- learning how other cultures used magic, the significance of it, how it was woven into their languages and such. It’s a pretty important field when just over the hills there’s some fire that never goes out, and can only be really contained and we don’t fucking know why right now, just that some culture did this a few thousand years ago and vanished.
Sorry to go on about my little idea, I’m just so happy that like… someone else is thinking about this kind of thing. That someone would like to read about wizards arguing about if demons are really evil as a whole or if they’re just being summoned wrong and are just guides, until one of them up and brings forth an archfiend just to solve the issue. The issue, of course, isn’t solved, and they keep arguing.
Awesome. Sounds great! and never apologize for talking about your work.