Why are the most powerful of wizards in fiction almost always depicted as withered old men?
Why not a sick pack of rock hard abs and some younger handsomer features instead?
Perhaps age and experience matter much more in the magical community.
Or maybe wizards are just not as vain as witches?
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
They just don't care. Sex will cost them their eldritch powers so they don't need to look good for women.
Learning magic takes a long fucking time and doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a workout routine. Or eating.
Some don't care for the aesthetic once they reach that point.
That being said, MANLY WIZARDS of PURE MUSCLE are the coolest motherfuckers ever.
>Or maybe wizards are just not as vain as witches?
wizards are typically secluded hermits absorbed in their own research, so yeah that'd be it
I thought witches traditionally were secluded hermits, too, they just lived in houses deep in the spooky woods rather than in isolated towers.
Being a witch is all about your interactions with others and therefore your appearance.
If a witch lives in a forest and noone knows to fear her, or come to her for medicines or whatever, could she really be considered a witch? What does a witch even do if the world forgets about her?
Meanwhile, a wizard is more than merely secluded, they're actively going to be fucking pissed if anyone comes to see them, because it's a distraction from the important shit they're doing 100% of the time that they go unobserved.
Wicked witches and old hags aren't the same as sexy sorceresses.
Wizened wizards are going to purposely go out of their way to look ancient. Age demands respect and they have the power to back it up.
Well, can withered old man be anything else and still be a force to be reckoned with?
>Wizened wizards are going to purposely go out of their way to look ancient
Do you think young wizards cast glamours to make them look older then?
That would actually make for an interesting story. A young mage trying to gatjer respect in academic circles.
I made a PNG once that was exaclty this. 15yo boy that wanted to be taken seriously, he casted on himself a disguise spell to look like an old Christopher Lee like gentleman.
(PNG = NPC, sorry 'bout that)
There's being the master of a martial arts dojo, in worlds where developed chi beats muscles every time.
In swedish rpg Eon. The spellcaster who fumble with their magic aging more quickly than average man.
Powerful wizards sporting youthful appearances piss me off to absolutely no conceivable end.
It's why I fucking hate anime with a passion.
I hear your view.
I see it.
I understand it.
Its stupid.
Anime is all about escapism. Naturally, it's going to birth unrealistic physical ideals.
Western fiction is far more consistent.
Wanna me cast grab the pussy spell on you?
>weeb
get out
...
Then "real life" wizards must upset the piss out of you.
Paracelsus was a fat baby faced dude, the Comte de Saint Germain was downright handsome, Crowley was a potato headed sodomite, but never looked old and wrinkly.
Really just John Dee (and maybe Rasputin) fit the knockoff Gandalf look.
Harry Potter or The Kingkiller's Chronicle would like to have a word with you about powerful youthful wizards in Western settings.
They weren't exactly young people. Not sure what you're getting at.
>Really just John Dee (and maybe Rasputin) fit the knockoff Gandalf look.
There was actually a great deal more than you realize. Eliphas Levi (the Crowley before Crowley) being a very notable one.
Yeah, except the characters in those books aren't bordering on Mary Sue levels. There's actual consistency regarding their capabilities.
Anime just doesn't have this advantage.
>Crowley
>never looked old
Crowley died at the age of 72
>powerful magic user
>isn't a little girl
into the trash
...
Bull fucking shit, do you have any idea how greatly the power levels of great wizards and heroes fluctuated in their stories?
Merlin's power varies enormously from day to day. One moment he's upsetting the very heavens, the next he's trapped under a rock. Literally a rock.
Karna could destroy the entire multiverse with an arrow, and yet died because he chariot's wheel got stuck in the mud.
You know nothing of ancient myth or magic. People have been writing inconsistent power levels since the dawn of time. To say nothing of being a pretty boy.
Cuchulain was a pretty boy, so handsome he was effectively a bishonen.
Many of the Buddhist saints are androgynous, same with Hindu gods.
Alexander the Great, a real fucking person, had eyes of different colors, short hair, a clean-shaven pretty face and his backstory was the smartest man ever taught him as a child and then he conquered the world by fighting in person in an era of mass warfare.
TLDR: You're free to hate inconsistent power levels or pretty boys, but do so universally, don't act like you're supporting an older, nobler tradition that is being defaced by us shitty moderns.
Now you're ranting about something completely irrelevant. Nice.
He mentioned the "consistency" of -two- novels and you start raving about mythology/folklore as a whole? The figures you mentioned aren't even wizards, aside from the obvious Merlin.
Calm down.
Unless you're an elf, who skip sleeping by just meditating 4 hours a day. Ever wondered why they had immunity to sleep in some editions?
Meant to reply to...
Who cares. Humans are better at magic regardless.
Requiring everyone else be drooling retards so one can believe themselves better is nothing to be proud of. It's honestly fucking sad and pathetic.
What does this even mean?
Being old makes you look more harmless. It probably started out as a trope subversion.
Besides who need to look good when you can cast charm person.
Why not both? Both is best!
It is related.
He is a cranky old wizard
In almost EVERY incarnation of wizards they gain their powers from study. Studying takes time, therefore the older said wizard is the more time and opportunity he/she has had to study and learn his craft. A young wizard = a shitty wizard, if the wizards in the setting learn magic from study.
Well, the most powerful wizards spend their lives getting more powerful, so unless they use magic to make themselves appear younger, they will be old.
>not wizards
I'm not an expert but I know enough Type-Moon to know that Cuchulainn was an expert in Runes and qualifies for the Caster class.
But anime is full of old powerful guys
I have a major npc in my campaign called the Beautiful King, he is a rather young, freshly liched wizard at age 64, but uses his magic to shroud himself to be a six-packed Golden God.
Learning magic is supposed to take very long amounts of time, require extreme academia, and be lethally and unstably dangerous for the unenlightened, requiring would be practitioners to dedicate incredible amounts of time to mastering it.
Witches are similarly usually depicted as ostracized crones (who often disguise themselves as beautiful or young, even going to far as to steal those things), implying that learning to be a witch requires great sacrifice, dark bargains, and a sort of worldly study that leaves little time for social interaction.
However thanks to weebs, both those time-honored tropes are super dead. Magic is a talent for cool kids and requires virtually nothing to use.
We live in the age of Little Witch Academia and Magi the boy wizard prodigy. And it is awful.