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@noah-cochran

Seeing your thoughts more throughout this thread, I’m curious as to why making a natural ability “ritualistic” would turn it from okay to not okay, and how much you consider individual intent vs objective reality to matter in a “magic” system.

Sanderson’s systems are on a spectrum of natural and supernatural that you can’t really pin down as one or the other. Mistborn and Stormlight both take place in the same universe, in which a being who may or may not be their universe’s God in Mormon cosmology was shattered into a bunch of shards, each of which bound to a human consciousness to form a being with immutable intent toward something like Ruin and Honor. These beings went to different planets and their bodies became, in different ways, power sources for what you could call magic systems.

An ordinary person, if they were born on one of these shards’ planets, might simply have the power from birth to do some fantastical thing like have perfect pitch and sense when other humans are around, regardless of who they worship or whether they acknowledge the shard that gives them power.

You could make a strong argument that Cosmere magic (that being the name of his books’ shared universe) is natural. The ecosystems of entire planets shape themselves over millennia because of the presence of energy which operates on our understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.

But the abilities also literally come from absurdly powerful spiritual beings. The books, like many fantasy books, operate on a different cosmology to our world. Assuming real-world witchcraft involves asking beings who are explicit enemies of God for power, that applies not at all to any cosmology where that spiritual dynamic isn’t in place. The Cosmere certainly has no demons. There are incarnations of urges like Ruin and Hatred, but the people who align with them are obviously insane and evil, and the people who use the power of other Shards often have not the slightest idea of ultimate cosmic reality. All they know is they can fly, or whatever.

Though even here I’m leaving out huge chunks of the very complex cosmology, one which is by no means fleshed out enough that the fans know how it all works–where do you see the lines drawn here?