I believe magi are able to control both types if they want. Though it's hard to see Aladdin, for example, wanting to control the dark rukh, at least for now. It might affect the magi's personality. If ordinary magicians can control both with some tools, like those at Magnostadt to a degree and definitely the Al Thamen villains, then it would be strange if magi couldn't.
I think it's way to early to just assume Scheherazade is a non-villain. I mean, she's probably not, but there's no reason she couldn't be.Originally Posted by Ryllharu
Ordinary mages can only control Dark Ruhk. That's why it's so enticing, because up till now Ruhk was an energy source that only Magi could manipulate.
That's the only advantage I see from using Dark Ruhk, since White is in such abundance in the natural world. Dark Ruhk seems to stem from a source of hatred or evil as opposed to nature. I expect it to possess a will or attribute which, as you say, may have side effects on the user - if not make it outright incompatible with good-natured magi. If you're channeling it with tools, then it might not have such a significant effect.
Her country uses slaves, and she seems to consider Titus to be less than human (whether he really is human or not is yet to be revealed), so she could well be someone to fight against.
If it's not Isuzu-chan Mii~
I suppose that would depend on the definition of control. Magnostadt is collecting a huge amount of rukh from the 200k goi, and I believe most of it is used to power the city itself plus any magical tool manufacture (although these would overlap), including those that require converting it to dark rukh. We haven't actually seen even a glimpse of the tool manufacturing process, so it's hard to say if they all require converting to dark rukh, but I'd find that unexpected, until proven otherwise. Especially since the teacher said they knew little about the dark rukh until 12 years ago. Surely manufacturing tools is an older art than that.
We're back to a definitions argument then. I still stand by that magoi collected from the goi is still magoi. It's not Ruhk.
The whole idea of using Ruhk is that you don't need magoi production, whether it's from yourself or your 'livestock'.
If it's not Isuzu-chan Mii~
Episode 17 - HS
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I really like the political situation in this show. Aladdin is the kind of idealistic, happy go lucky person who ought to have easy B&W situations and decisions appear in front of him, but instead he's always forced to choose between flawed, gray ones. Magnostadt is no good, despite saving magicians from oppression. Leam is a wretched place as well. Kou doesn't even need to be mentioned. So, he's left with little choice but to stop everybody. I guess the first moments of the first episode were about that.
For some reason I kept thinking Magnostadt is quite a powerful place, but apparently it's more like the weakest among the power players, if even that. Maybe it's only a little better than some random places like Alibaba's home country, though being a home to many magicians it has much more publicity.
I'm still choosing to trust Mogamett at his words. Aside from viewing goi as cattle, he's a good person. He never seems to lie about anything, even to a person like Aladdin who he is convinced is spying for Sinbad (even if Aladdin is really working for himself). They may have gathered the knowledge from Al Thamen, but again he was betrayed. The terrible things he's done are still solely for the betterment of magicians, and though he helped create the dark metal vessels, he wasn't the one who put them into the hands of manipulated innocents like Dunya or Kassim.
I think Mogamett has faith enough in the power of magicians on their own. What we saw when Titus and Aladdin dueled was proof enough to me that they can stand their own against most metal vessel users. The average magicians can kill dozens of regular soldiers on their own, and the 1st Class kind can stand toe-to-toe with the best fighters. That said, the Fanalis are an entirely different breed of soldier. We've seen what just one can do plenty, and even moreso a properly trained one. These are a dozen or more.
Irene on the other hand...she seems to embrace dark ruhk and dark metal vessels. If the nasty stuff comes out of anywhere, my money is on her doing it, maybe even against Mogamett's orders. I don't think she's allied secretly with Al Thamen, I think she's just drunk on the power it provides.
edit:
I'm actually convinced after this episode and the last that Mogamett has been correct all along. Magicians should never be ruled or governed by non-magicians. Every story we heard from the other students or teachers has been along the lines of, "I was run out of my home by my own family," or "I was used by others for their own personal gain."
Even Yam is being used by Sinbad, willing or no. She's shortening her own life substantially to generate that barrier, when Sinbad can protect the country himself (and on his own!) when he's not too busy running around like an idiot.
There's only two magicians we've seen who haven't been treated like shit all their lives, or used by others for personal gain:
Aladdin, and Baba. That's it.
Even Judal is the way he is because of how his family was treated when he was young (shown in a brief flashback).
It's also worth noting that Aladdin has gotten hot-headed about injustices all over the world...except here. He doesn't argue with Mogamett. Titus does instead. Aladdin can't disagree with Mogamett because he's seen many of the same things.
The only thing Mogamett is wrong about is that goi should be treated like disposable garbage the same way he used to be treated.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Tue, 01-28-2014 at 06:05 PM.
Yeah, magicians probably would be far better off with their own country and they surely deserved it. But it should be a country without a host of goi being kept underground as a rukh production facility. I'm sure quite a few non-magicians would eventually find their way in as paid workers of certain professions, as traders, as diplomats, etc, or born from magician parents even if they founded a country without a single goi within the borders, but that would still be far more preferable to the current situation. One can't help but think of Israel and Palestinians when looking at Magnostadt. As I've also said before, I don't think the current situation with the goi could last too long anyway, as soon as the new generation starts to grow up.
Mogamett is only made more dangerous because he genuinely believes the current system is splendid.
All in all Leam and Kou should just fight each other and leave Magnostadt alone for the time being. Magnostadt isn't currently interested in expansion, even if it would be interested in rescuing magicians from other countries. One of Mogamett's saving features is that he has no interest in ruling non-magicians, so he would likely leave them in peace in their own countries, as long as he didn't hear news of magicians being treated poorly.
Nothing like an existential crisis scored to the sweet sound of butt rock.
I don't know why Alibaba is in the Fanalis squad, but whatever man! Obvious irony in Morgianna going off on her own to look for the Fanalis and Alibaba is the one that finds them.
Scheherazade just does not seem very cool.
That is a...weirdly racist sentiment.
Magi are not magicians.
That's like saying gay people would be far better off with their own country.
Segregation is not the answer. No solution that involves treating one group differently than the other is.
The answer is to build a place where magicians and humans are all just considered people.
Gay people are just people, nothing more, nothing less (although they would go extinct in their own country since they couldn't breed, but that's not the point).
However, there is a huge fundamental difference between magicians and everybody else. It's the simple fact magicians are inherently far more capable and strong. Throughout the history differences in political power and wealth have caused one revolution or civil war after another, not to mention lesser civil disorders. But those are things that can always be changed. A person may lose their riches or be thrown out of a political position (even if it was inherited nobility). However, if a portion of the citizens were born with powers that allowed them to best 10 normal ones in any fight and that would grant them other boosts as well, there would be no solution to it. They would always be better. Period. Normal folks would get envious more and more, thinking the magicians only get what they do because they were born that way, not because of their efforts or contributions to the society, and the magicians would start to think they don't want to be ruled by lesser people who only want to drag the magicians down because of envy and unfounded fears. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen, inevitably.
No matter what Mogamett says now and even honestly believes, things would change and prove true what I think Star Trek put nicely: Superior ability breeds superior ambition.
Oh, so professional athletes should have their own country then. Or scientists then?
Do you just segregate everyone that's better than you at something? Everyone has advantages and disadvantages to other people.
You can't even say it's just being racist, because at least people of a specific race are born from other people of that race. Magicians are born spontaneously from normal people. So what happens when the world finds out you're a country run by mages that enslaves it's unpowered human populace? All they have to do is stop sending Magnoshtadt their magicians.
Bullshit. You only think that because that's the trope X-Men and every other fictional work pushes. And they push them because it's a conflict that creates a good story, not because it's a problem that actually has no solution.
Except that Star Trek is full of subversions to that notion. In fact, it's really weird that you'd bring up Star Trek because that's pretty much one long example of the greater aspects of humanity ultimately triumphing over their own failings. The entire Federation is built out of races that are innately better than others, all working together for common goals.
And for every example like Q that proves that adage, there'll be some other all-powerful being that will be the exact opposite.
Last edited by DarthEnderX; Wed, 01-29-2014 at 12:35 PM.
Hmm... You might be right. Considering some absolute monarchies did last a very long time, it might be possible to have a country where magicians formed the nobility and royalty, the non-magicians the rest, as long as the non-magician masses were given a degree of freedom for economic growth and success, for example, and weren't universally treated as slaves. They could never cross the commoner-nobility border, but the general stability might be enough for the magicians to maintain and crush any unrest effectively.
It would never work the other way around, though. No non-magician rulers could sleep their nights peacefully imagining there are groups of people around who could defeat the royal guards and remove the leaders easily, whenever they wanted. Sooner or later they would either try to curb or eliminate the magicians. Even having court mages wouldn't ensure stability.
Moving aside the notion that a group of people traditionally used like slaves as deserving the right to govern themselves as somehow being racist...
You're serious? That's amazing.
They most certainly are magicians. They're a special kind of magician, with the largest reserves of magoi, the ability to change golden ruhk rather than merely make commands (per Myers' and nameless instructor's lesson in eps 8), use the ruhk of other's, and raise dungeons.
We've since learned that magicians can forcibly manipulate black ruhk, so controlling Ruhk (in general) is not unique to Magi.
You're saying that is that a tiger isn't a cat, only housecats are cats.
Why does one group or the other have to exclusively make up the leadership?
Why can't you have some leaders who are magicians, some who aren't, and the determining factor isn't whether your a magician or not, but who is actually good at leading.
The best solution here is not to form weirdly exclusive kingdoms where each group rules over themselves. It's to not have kingdoms at all, but to have democracies.
Well because it is. An easy way to tell is to simply plug in an actual race in place of the fictional races being used here.
What you said is basically like saying "Black people should never be ruled or governed by non-black people." Which is being racist in favor of black people, but that's still technically being racist.
If we're talking about the English language, then yes, anyone who uses magic is a magician
But I'm not sure that's how this SERIES uses the term. I think they use it to mean humans that can use magic.
It doesn't seem to me that Magi are even human.
How I described it is exactly how the series uses the term. "Magicians" is the blanket term. Magi are a subset of that set, they are magicians with additional abilities. They are as human as anyone else who happens to have extraordinary magical powers. Scheherazade uses advanced, continually cast spells (using external ruhk no doubt) to create things like Titus. We can safely assume she can do even more than that. Yunan did...whatever it is he's done to that void in the Dark Continent. Judal has very strong offensive magic and manipulates black ruhk to the same degree Aladdin does with Solomon's Wisdom, but for Al Thamen's ends. Aladdin is fairly mundane by Magi standards, because he's pretty weak when compared.
Aladdin has gems installed by Yam to block his ability to manipulate external ruhk. But he can still use his own internal ruhk like anyone else attending or working for Magnostadt. He can only push magoi outward from himself to issue commands to the golden ruhk, fueled by his internal reservoirs. That makes him a magician. Those internal stores were weak because he was overly reliant on external ruhk.
I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand. The series couldn't have been more clear from the early episodes of season 1, his brief lessons with Yam, and finally the exhaustive explanation on how it all works during his time in Magnostadt.
Aladdin is born with average capacity, not from lack of use. Using his own stores more won't change that, just his proficiency level.
If it's not Isuzu-chan Mii~
In a democracy everybody should be equal (even though even in most of our democracies some people are clearly more equal than others). However, magicians would never be equal with non-magicians. The non-magicians especially would feel that, whereas magicians, with their vast extra powers and possibilities, could of course appear magnanimous for their own part, but that would be just a facade. You seem to forget one thing about democracy, though, which is its other name: A dictatorship of the majority. Magicians would remain a minority, likely, so the majority made of the non-magicians would try to set all sorts of rules restricting the use of magic, to make non-magicians and magicians more equal with each other. There's a plethora of fiction depicting just that. Since magicians are just human, many would be sheep and swallow their pride, but many wouldn't accept such bullshit. The result would be civil unrest and unhappiness.
Okay.
How do you know that? Are they actually born from human parents?
For all you know, Magi are some kind of magical construct like Titus.
Aladdin lived alone in some space city for, like, hundreds of years. What makes you think he's human?
No, in a democracy, everyone should have equal RIGHTS, not equal capabilities.
Being able to do something someone else can't doesn't make you not a person. Otherwise, again, pro athletes and scientists would be their own race somehow and be discriminated against.
Dictatorship of the minority is only applicable if you separate magicians into a minority, instead of just grouping them with everyone else, which is a completely unnecessary thing to do.
Look, what you're talking about is absolutely LIKELY in this story. Because it IS a story so it IS probably going to follow the tropes.
But you and Ryllharu are both talking about the situation like the solution is impossible. It's not. It's as simple as everyone stopping being assholes. Now, that's not going to happen, because then you wouldn't have a story to tell.
I'd say it is possible for magicians and humans to coexist equally, in fiction or in reality. It is just extremely unlikely.
Peace.
How do I know that? I've been watching the show.
Judal is a Magi. Judal had a flashback again referenced during the scene where he talked about it to Sinbad after breaking Yam's barrier (season 1) that showed his parents. They were murdered by Al Thamen. It was pretty clear that they were either from Kou, or a region that has since been conquered and absorbed by Kou. Scheherazade and Yunan it is less clear. Aladdin also had a parental figure, though he can't remember them or is adamantly choosing not to remember them. You might be right about Aladdin, since he "doesn't belong in this era" being from the old world.
It wasn't a space city. We've since learned it is the remains of the old world after the catastrophe occurred. The one that Aladdin has been having visions of while in Magnostadt. The dungeons connect to it, which is why when they conquer one, we see the sequence where the victors are being transported back to the present world (often with a giant pile of treasure).
edit:
To make it clear, the flashback to Judal's past was at the end of a fight with Aladdin when Aladdin grabbed him. But it was discussed between Sinbad and Judal later.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Thu, 01-30-2014 at 04:42 PM.
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