I know there have already been a lot of posts about ‘The Magicians’ series by Lev Grossman and the various eyebrow-raising content within. Still, I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere, so here goes:
In the second book ‘The Magician King’, we go back to the timeline of the first book to spend more time with Julia, Quentin’s friend/unrequited crush from his adolescence. Having failed the entrance exam to Brakebills, she spirals into a depression from having no outlet for her undeveloped magical talent.
Eventually, through internet forums, she finds a group of people who are more or less in her situation. To gain access to this group, however, she has to prove her bona fides:
>To get in the door you first had to show them your
prescriptions. They wanted credentials, solid ones. A bunch
of nerds like this, they didn’t want to hear your whining, and
they didn’t want to read your poems—sorry, Jack—or look at
your doomy watercolors. This crowd wasn’t softcore. If you
were depressed, they wanted to see the hard stuff, a
diagnosis from an actual psychiatrist and hard-core
chemical-on-neuron action. And if you were rocking double-
neurochemical-penetration, like Julia was, all the better.
Now, that really crimped my cabbage. Of course at first I thought this was setting us up for something – that eventually there would be a reveal about how being mentally ill isn’t actually some codeword for being magic and special.
But – no! There’s no twist. It’s exactly what it appears to be. If you’re not profoundly sick, you cannot be a wizard.
I should also point out that we never see any of the people in this group, who Julia eventually goes to live with, displaying any outward signs of mental illness. No crying, no panic attacks, no staying in bed all day, no avoiding people or activities due to anxiety. Not even any personal slovenliness. It’s like having depression or anxiety or CPTSD or any other disorder is just some invisible chronic condition whose only side effect is making you cool and sexy.
by Shto_Delat
5 Comments
>It’s like having depression or anxiety or CPTSD or any other disorder is just some invisible chronic condition whose only side effect is making you cool and sexy
Is anybody cool or sexy in the books?! They are a bunch of dysfunctional and obsessed people.
I’m adding “crimped my cabbage” to my life. Thank you for that.
That’s not how I read it. I hadn’t read it as “mentally ill people are magic”. More like if you’ve experienced magic and want it so bad that being cut off from the source of knowledge about it really fucked you up, you’re the type of person they’re looking for.
I read it as most of these people didn’t have whatever skills the academy was looking for to get in so must be willing to explore and tap into other, less savory or well known methods. Also, makes it clear the mind wipe didn’t really work for them so their latent talent is probably higher than the academy assumed. And without the guidance of the academy, you need the drive of obsession to follow through. It’s like trying to join a gang. They’re not looking for the people with a good family life and strong sense of self worth.
“If you’re not profoundly sick, you cannot be a wizard.” That’s not true in the book. It’s just for that group. Which is a pretty f’d up group.
I enjoyed this series and that’s not quite how I interpreted that section – I read it as meaning that once you’ve brushed up against magic but can’t have it, that loss has a profound and devastating impact on you, which makes places like Brakebills almost criminally irresponsible toward magic kids and complicit in the bad events that follow.
I did frequently find myself thinking about almost everyone in the books, “You people don’t need magic, you need therapy.”