Stealing from someone's comment about Cobra Kai:

[james_davis_nicoll]

Most fantastic school settings have the wizards/metahumans/whatever steered into one or maybe two specialized facilities. What if instead it works like sports or debate and every school in the region has their own program?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Pranks involved possessing the body of the rival's principal, not stealing a mascot.

[dsrtao]

It's the difference between magic/supers being rare and/or hidden and extremely common. To get a magic program in the majority of high schools, you need 10+% of the population being capable of it.

"Yeah, our thaumaturgy team sucked, but the alchemists ruled Regionals almost every year, and made it to State every year I was there."

[sraun]

Drew Hayes Super Powereds series has five US Universities having programs specifically for supers who intend to become heros. It's a universe where there are a lot of people with a single metahuman power - from near worthless (I can change the color of my eyes) to incredibly powerful (absolute control of all material within 6' at the sub-atomic level). There are enough Supers that each school graduates either five or ten new superheroes every year. Superhero professional lifetimes apparently run from about a decade to until they die.

There's a class of metahumans called Powereds - they have an ability, but no control. One example was a guy who teleported up to several hundred miles every time he sneezed. They're ... not well treated by the Supers.

The Supers programs have an annual competition for their senior classes - that's apparently the only interaction between the schools at that level.

How the rest of the society deals with non-Super level metahumans was ... not within scope of the series. I would be interested to see how things get organized for them. There's got to be something to deal with the guy who's power is 'able to run fast' (not arbitrarily, but more on the order of a one-minute mile) who wants to be on a track team.

[rwpikul]

Ages ago¹, as part of the background of a superhero game I was running, I had it that sporting events had added an 'unlimited' category alongside men's and women's. The only real restriction it had was that you had to physically do the sport, (e.g. you had to run a marathon, you couldn't fly or transform your feet into roller skates).

Some events ended up being considered a bit pointless, (100m dash: A bang, a fraction of a second of blurred motion, 10 minutes of officials going through the high-speed camera footage to figure out who won and if anyone was DQed). Others had safety issues, (you can throw a shot put _how_ fast‽).


1: Long enough that the system wasn't just Heroes Unlimited, it was the pre-revised edition.

[petrea_mitchell]

And at that point you have to have changes in the world that affect more than the schools. You can't have an alternate shadow government for the magical population; they need to be subject to mundane authorities in everyday life, something I have seen approximately never.

(Half a tip of a hat to Jean Johnson's Theirs Not to Reason Why series on that point. The author has constructed the laws and auditing practices so that the heroine can find a special loophole to allow essentially free exercise for her own powers, but kudos for at least thinking this stuff through. Unfortunately I had to drop the series in the middle of a book when it suddenly went all in on the zombie theory of religion.)

[petrea_mitchell]

Whoops, that was supposed to be a reply to dsrtao above.

[davidgoldfarb]

Zombie theory of religion? [*]

[petrea_mitchell]

The idea that if a society has a dominant religion, every person in that society has memorized all the minutiae of its holy book, epic poem, or what have you, and will obey every single rule in it to the letter as if they have no free will.

[dragoness_e]

Ah. Since that has happened exactly never in the history of the world, it would unsuspend my disbelief faster than a lead zeppelin crashes. Unless the plot was about mind control, where religion/custom was being blamed/used as a cover. Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time comes to mind.

[violsva]

In order for it to be an extracurricular like sports rather than a standard part of the curriculum, it would have to be the kind of thing where there's no real expectation you can make a living at it - sure, a few hundred people in the entire country might end up professional wizards, but for most people it's just something you do for fun on weekends.

[ba_munronoe]

I wonder what magic that's fun and not too hard to do but won't pay the bills looks like, or, counter wise, what sort of remunerative magical skills take tremendous sustained effort to achieve? I think we'd need a magical system that doesn't look much like magic in Harry Potter.

[petrea_mitchell]

I think it might be a pretty good example. Most magic-using adults in Harry Potter have ordinary jobs where the core skills necessary aren't about spellcasting, just in a setting where not being able to use magic at all is a crippling disability.

[roseembolism]

One idea might be magic as an extender of normal abilities. As in, there are magical knitting needles and kitchen tools, but that can't do a better job than the wizard. So if you want your magic to be useful at something, you have to be good at it yourself.

[keith_morrison]

One way that would work is that magic is transient: it can effect the world, but once it's done, normal rules apply. So you might be able to use magic to construct a building, but once that's done, the building has to be structurally sound in order to stay up. So someone wanting to build a structure with magic has to either follow very detailed instructions or be enough of a skilled builder/engineer to figure out what they have to do in order to keep it from falling apart under its own weight.

[mikeda]

There's the illusion magic in Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories series. It has some quasi-technological uses but it's mostly used for art and entertainment.

In that series it's very common for people to have some ability with illusion magic but there are only a relatively small number of people who do it professionally.

(If I recall correctly, the social use of illusion magic tends to be a female pasttime but the ARTISTS tend to be male.)

[dsrtao]

Let's suppose alchemy isn't just getting rare materials and combining them in various ways, but also involves meditation and chanting to infuse the potion with power, and/or performing various steps of rituals which are widely distributed in time and space but must be done by, say, the same person or at least people who were involved in the ritual from the beginning. That would take care of "tremendous sustained effort". Make these part of a designed magical engineering project with spin-off goals, and it might make for a good living.

To crib from Poul Anderson, what would a magical space program look like? To crib from Diane Duane, interstellar teleport gates run on a hub and spoke system? To copy concerns of the 1950s, what do intelligence agencies do, and how? If the results are effective, high costs are not a barrier to military projects.

[dagibbs]

I think it is going to depend on how common/wide-spread the "special" thing is.

One of the basic assumptions of our school system is that everybody(*) can learn. Everybody can learn to read. Everybody can learn history. Everybody can learn math. Of course, some will be better at this than others.

If we speculate a world where everybody can do magic to some extent or other, but some are better than others, then, yes, it would makes sense that it would be part of the school system. Colleges/universities would have faculties of magic (along side science or engineering), and lower schools might have classes in whatever the easiest of magic skills are... "Basic Focus" or whatever.

But a more super-heros/meta-humans we have a couple problems. Generally only a small fraction of the population is "super"; and generally every power is different. There might be meta-human studies, but it would be studying meta-humans, perhaps from an anthropological/sociological point of view, or perhaps from a physical sciences point of view, but it wouldn't be "how to super better". And, similar problem for recruiting super-sports -- how do you establish competitions when everyone is different.


* The assumption is, I think really, that almost everybody can learn, and those that can't don't really matter.

[roseembolism]

In the case of magic, the go-to reference would be Operation Chaos (ignoring the politics, lalalala). Magic is commonplace, but a professional magic user needs to specialize in it with a college program.

[(Anonymous)]

And a fellow who has a legitimately useful wartime magical skill goes to college to get an engineering degree (having had no luck in Hollywood) while the magical equivalent of a intelligence officer (say a code breaker) gets a job as a professor pretty easily. So magic helps - but training and study matter.

[austin_dern]

Well, it ought to make Gil Thorp a more fun comic strip at least.