Young wizards / new wizards: power level changes post-Ordeal?

[ATimson]

Originally posted by marniebrown1:
WHAT!?!?! They're only making it 2 and a half hours!?!?!?! That makes you wonder, how long will the fifth one be!? They made LOTR longer than 2 and a half hours, why can't Harry Potter, one of the most famous books ever (Not that that's the way I like it, I'd much prefer the YW books being more popular) be long too???!!!

Because if they make it any longer than it already is, kids won't be able to sit through it; they just don't have the attention span.

--
Grr. Argh.

[Sam]

Yeah, but still my god! They could take a break for 15 or so minutes in the theaters if lil ones can't sit through it, and on VHS and DVD's you can stop them.

KsS8er: I don't really like the actors you mentioned, I'm too lazy to go back up and mention them. How long have you been reading AAG? I couldn't put it down so it only took me 2 days. Yeah, it is funny. I even tried to get Tui to read it. Where are you in it?

M: Yeah really think of how freaking short the 5 will be, they sooooooooooo can't cut much of it and it still be a good movie.

~Sam (Hifun55) and Dog~
"It's hard enough to be what you are, Harder to be what you're not; It's hard to know what you need to get, harder to know what you've got" -Hilary Duff, Metamorphisis, Workin' It Out

[Worldgating Team Member]

I haven't read Wish List yet, but I love Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl. I love Artemis Fowl and the Young Wzard series equally, which speaks for how good it is. But tell me Colfer didn't get the scene at the end of the second book from Aragorn and Arwen! *rolls eyes* She gives him a medallion, and he wears it around his neck.... come ON people

Iin Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ my Art, looking always to the heart of Time, where all our myriad worlds lie whole...

[Quill]

Okay, I can't resist this one. I've never read the book in question, but...where else would he wear a medallion aside from his neck? Does he even have pockets?

[Worldgating Team Member]

Okay, I can't resist this one. I've never read the book in question, but...where else would he wear a medallion aside from his neck? Does he even have pockets?

okay Quill, you caught me. You usually do wear medallions around your neck. But still! Did Holly have to give him a medallion of all things! And if you had read it you'd know that Holly is an elf and Artemis is a human, which is mainly my reference point

Iin Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ my Art, looking always to the heart of Time, where all our myriad worlds lie whole...

my parents had to ground me to keep me from going through my copies of the books and typing every part they left out and e-mailing it to director columbus

I have not read wish list either,and i agree about the lameness of the medallion thing

[Sam]

In hp?

My TV hasn't been working right since the begingig of the summer it works then goes fuzzy we NEED a new one. But, you have to hit it on the side and hope it comes on. Neways "the twins" and I were watching the 2nd one and I got really mad because they left out so much. And then to top all of my madness off the TV went out. And instead of hiting it on the side I got REALLY PO'd and kicked the TV and there is stuff on to of our entertainment center and half that fell off and my moms porcelin (Sp?) cats broke and I was in soo much truble. I haven't been brave enough to watch it sense.

~Sam (Hifun55) and Dog~
"It's hard enough to be what you are, Harder to be what you're not; It's hard to know what you need to get, harder to know what you've got" -Hilary Duff, Metamorphisis, Workin' It Out

[PK]

*chuckles* Really, if you went through every fantasy novel and objected to the elements that sound like something Tolkien did, you'd be objecting to a lot. Especially since Tolkien included plenty of echoes from earlier sources -- folklore, mythology, and so on -- so something doesn't have to be even remotely based on his work to bear a resemblance. And if a scene is a deliberate allusion... well, really, so what? There are worse things to allude to. The description of the Powers working on the planet in different places in A Wizard Abroad is rather nicely compatible with the way Tolkien's Valar and Maiar did it, too.

As for HP movies, well, that's why movies based on books can be enjoyable, but never really count. You can't do things quite the same way, and even with the author directly involved, some things won't come out the same. (Eye color, notably, for those, if I recall? I'm a little lost on the problem with Pettigrew, though; Rowling said he was chubby and that in PoA he looked like he had been but had lost a lot of weight recently.) The movie version of The Count of Monte Cristo is actually quite a fun story, but about the second half of it reflects the book only in parts. There was a time I would have hated it, but having gone in with the assumption they'd change it around a fair amount, I didn't really mind. (It helped that the wildly altered romance aspect did include some pretty good lines.)

DD herself has mentioned that in making a TV series based on Young Wizards there will be changes, deliberate ones, made so that it will work on television.

Getting back to the "youngest wizards" bit (if a digression back to the original topic may be permitted ), I think that the reference is probably to an overall principle along the same lines as "the energy is running out of everything" and the part about matter early in the universe being... fiercer and more itself.

I also think it refers to a certain intrinsic personal power level, as it looks like wizards in positions of authority may be allocated energy for the purpose at times -- though "power" does get used in pretty much every possible sense sometimes, and I'm sure authority is part of it.

There are definitely multiple components. We've had mentions, I believe, of not knowing what isn't possible, and Chao suggested that the universe favored young people who hadn't yet mastered the plurals of the Speech -- perhaps it's possible for imprecision to leave room for things to go right as well as having dangers. On the other hand, Tom or Carl mentioned something about why they were, as Seniors, given "so much power to work with," and the Galactic Arm Coordinator apparently had a very high rating. The latter could suggest that the Coordinator was selected from a species or order of being with particularly high ratings, but the former implies that either one's "power to work with" includes authority or that based on authority one may be provided energy for one reason or another.

But there's quite definitely a biological component as well, and I think that must be a significant part of what's being referred to with the age comments. (I also think it's probably part of what's involved in paying for a spell with time off your life, or with the life-price, but that there's probably more involved there.) Nita and Kit are actually told in High Wizardry that because they're both having growth spurts of one form or another, and because of something about the hormones involved, their power will be more accessible to them for a while -- but that it's easy to overextend. (So this would appear to be a biological reason that they can use more of it, not that they have more of it, actually -- hmm.) Wizards tend to take up exercise as their power levels drop and wizardry becomes more demanding, so that they'll be in better shape. In The Wizard's Dilemma and in Wizard's Holiday, it's emphasized with Kit and Nita, respectively, that doing a spell extracts a certain amount of energy from them right then. I don't think they ever really noticed that earlier; actually, I wonder if the overlays interfering with casual wizardry in Ireland masked Nita's power-drop to a certain extent? WTM makes a good point about power-conservation being mentioned there; I'd actually forgotten about it because most of the times Nita specifically doesn't do wizardry in that book seemed to be on account of the warnings that the overlays would mess things up.

There's also a moment in SYW when Nita is frightened less by anything else in the Lone Power's alternate universe than by the fact that she's tired and not bouncing back, because she always has before.

I have read that teenagers genuinely do need extra sleep. I wonder if what happens with wizards is that as their body really turns its attention to that last kick into physical adulthood, less of the energy is "surplus" and available for wizardry (though evidently hormones may allow them to draw on it anyway, tempporarily)... and afterwards, there's aging. And if a wizard is in better physical shape, either there's more energy to draw on or it's easier to cope with the loss, I suppose.

Okay, definitely enough rambling for now. I suspect that could have been better organized....