white-aster:

sixth-light:

eruvadhril:

kitsunewill:

prokopetz:

It used to puzzle me why it was such a common element in urban fantasy settings – particularly those of tabletop roleplaying games – that the reason magic stays hidden is because people don’t want to believe in it.

In the real world, people are desperate to believe in magic. You see it everywhere, from spirit mediums on TV to the horoscopes in the daily paper.

The idea that there’d be an institutional refusal to believe in magic is just so alien to the demonstrable facts of human psychology that it would seriously hurt my suspension of disbelief.

Talking cats and setting things on fire with your mind is one thing, but a human psychology that lacks an inclination toward magical thinking is simply bizarre.

Then it hit me.

The public’s refusal to believe in magic in urban fantasy settings is a stand-in for the perennial nerd fallacy that non-nerds are stupid, and only the special, nerdy elite have the objectivity to understand the world as it truly is.

Charming.

This kind of fucked me up.

This is a huge problem I have with any setting that has a Masquerade in place (see also basically any Santa Claus movie where Adults Not Believing In Santa is a plot point, but gifts not bought by those adults mysteriously appear in their houses every 25th of December). If magic is a force in your universe and a non-zero number of people can reliably use it to cause things to happen, then it’s not going to be this mystical thing that nobody believes in except the Chosen Few, especially not if people are kind of vaguely aware of the concept of magic as a thing and everyone just thinks it’s fictional. It’d be like the population of the world suddenly and collectively deciding somewhere around the Renaissance that electromagnetism didn’t exist, and the Chosen Ones making a highly-mobilised effort from then on to cover up lightning strikes. And then the protagonist of the novel zaps themselves on a doorhandle after they walk across a carpet in socks and suddenly they have to travel by bullet train to electrical engineering school and get in huge amounts of trouble if they ever use a battery-powered fan in a Muggle community.

It’s worse than that – often in these settings scientists are reluctant to believe in observable, repeatable magic. Have any of these people met scientists? We would go absolutely nuts for an entire aspect of the universe we hadn’t had a chance to study yet. You’d have to routinely assassinate people to stop magic being studied. 

^yes. this. exactly.