Activity

@Sam-kowal Yep, music-magic of a sort is definitely a thing in Echoes from the Edge. In Inheritance, though, I’m pretty sure that the singing wasn’t essential to the magic; it was just the elves doing it for the Aesthetic. And yes, I loved Seraphina! I haven’t read it in ages, though . . .

It’s definitely not secret; it comes up in the first few chapters! The basic concept is that every type of thing has a song, and by singing or playing those songs or combining them in certain ways, a person can control different aspects of the world. So, in one of the first few chapters, my MC makes stone soften and harden by singing that stone’s song in a particular way. The thing is, most people can’t hear those songs; in fact, my MC is the only person (at least to her knowledge) who can. Most of the songs belong to physical things, but Death also has a song (which is a major plot point) and so do people as a whole.

Yesssss. He kind of has already started doing that a little— there was some definite overlap with another of the Cosmere worlds in Edgedancer. But I look forward to it happening more. (I also want it to start happening more with other series, but I’m not sure if it will or not.)

@Allison-grace Narnia is a weird one; it can kind of go either way. I think I would tend to categorize it as High Fantasy because even though Narnia is connected to Earth, it’s very distinct from Earth, plus it has prevalent “magic” (in the sense of talking animals, magical creatures and places, etc.), very distinct good and evil distinctions, and, arguably, large-scale plots that affect the whole world (at least in some of the books). That said, I can also see how you’d categorize it as Low Fantasy given the connection to Earth, especially if you don’t consider talking animals magic and say that the plots tend to be localized to only the country of Narnia. You could even say that some books are more low fantasy and some are more high fantasy. (So, I would definitely categorize LWW, The Last Battle, and probably The Magician’s Nephew as high fantasy, but you could make a solid argument for The Horse and His Boy and Prince Caspian and maybe even The Silver Chair as low fantasy. And then then Dawn Treader doesn’t fit neatly into either category.) So, yeah.

TL;DR: Because high and low fantasy are such broad categories, the boundaries between them are very fuzzy, and Narnia can be categorized as either one.