Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6986530-20170803220318/@comment-6986530-20180323185446

It's come to my attention that a lot of our magic pages overcomplicate, oversimplify, or just plain misrepresents the magic system in Evillious. To put it simply, I think we're going to have to give the entire magic category an overhaul.

Back when we were only going off of poor translations and info-mines of the series, it was perfectly fine to divide magic up into categories of the "effect" of the magic. The most immediate example that was brought up to me was Transformation Magic, which includes not only Eve changing Mikulia's appearance in the womb (albeit misrepresenting it as a cast spell) but also contractors' demonic transformations and Elluka changing their eye color.

But the series itself additionally distinguishes magic by how you cast it. Transformating magic lumps a variety of techniques all together as if they are the same spell in the Mechanics section, even though they probably shouldn't all be considered the same thing (for instance, Reincarnation Rituals, which involve moving a spirit to a new body, is said to be similar to a demon making their host's body sprout new features? That's misleading to the max!)

Not to mention that now that we have better translations, we know things about how magic works that we didn't know in the past. For example, Pricecheck's translation of Praeludium expands greatly on how the Clockwork Secret Art removes a demon from its host, when previously the assumption was made that it simply "reverses" the possession just because time was involved.

In addition to all that, a lot of pages misrepresent spells by the assumptions that they make about it, and by their broad application of one instance when we have only one example of it ever happening in-series (for instance, the Reincarnation Ritual.)

If we had a good look at how magic went on in the Magic Kingdom, when there were presumably hundreds of magic individuals who went about casting spells, then we could say "powerful mages could do this" and "powerful mages could do that." But we don't. We have ONE mage doing this, we have ONE mage doing that. We have instances where someone can guess at the identity of an unknown magic-user based on the magic that they can perform, like Irina and Elluka. Right now the assumption is that power level is the only thing that determines anything, but it's clear that there's more to it than that (at the very least, you have to have a talent for certain spells.)

On top of all that, it makes no distinction between what abilities are inherited or inherent to the individual and what abilities can be learned, like how many spells need to be taught while most detection magic seems to be more a case of "if you're magical you can sense magical things in turn. It also doesn't discuss borrowing at all--like Adam and Moonlit borrowing the inherent power of making a contract from the demons. In fact, "borrowing" powers is a common mechanic in the story but we have next to nothing on it on the wiki. I'd say it deserves a page in and of itself.)

And that's not even going into how the pages make a lot of odd assumptions about how the magic is performed which isn't ever confirmed in-story, or is flat out inaccurate, in order to fluff the page. (Like that whole fiasco with Gumillia's glasses.)

I don't have a simple proposed "fix" to this. I don't know the extent of the actual misinformation yet. But I do think all of the magic pages need to be heavily reexamined in what they're saying vs. what is actually confirmed by the series material. Additionally, we may need to make a new format for magic pages beyond just "mechanics and users" if we're going to be lumping wildly different mechanics all together as if it's the same kind of magic.

On the whole, I think that there has been a (however minor or major) misunderstanding of how magic actually works in the series and it's colored many of the magic pages.