Stream of Thought - Fantastic Mundanity

"Don't teachers realize that it's important to let students know about the hazards of cutting off hydra heads and how two will take the place of each one cut? What are they teaching, math?" - Dan Shive

BRAINSTORM/CRAZY THINKINGS TIME/WHATEVER

Okay, so in stuff like Harry Potter et al. The world they live in is magical, but the magic is only mundane to a select group, whereas the approach I'd like to go with is that the fantasticalities (if it's not a real word, it SHOULD be!) are ALL mundane. People are taught the riddles of the sphinx as much for personal safety as for fun, and lessons on irregular verbs may be delayed on account of some manner of beast breaching the walls, and where dungeons might indeed expand themselves under the earth, drawn towards populace. The idea of sentient or at the least living architecture is a lot of fun really.

At the moment we're kinda going for what, then? Magic and dungeons and beasts are mundane to everyone, but so is electricity and mechanics, as well as potential combinations thereof.
...That'd probably be somewhat difficult considering science and magic are like order and chaos.
Maybe you can "trick" magic? Like the whole thing where Mike and Jerry refuse to analyse Penny Arcade because they believe it shouldn't have worked, and that analysing it will dispel whatever IS keeping it aloft.

Magic's a tricksy thing at the best of times, it's probably fond of working when it's least likely to, entirely out of spite.

So, this is the sort of world we'd like to make to live in. How do we explore it?
The obvious route from the quote that set this off is of course to set it IN a school, but a) Harry Potter did it better and b) It's tacky, like how Airplane! seems tacky now because everyone else beat their style of comedy into the ground and then people forgot that they practically pioneered it. Like how things would go if people forgot who created Pythonesque humour. Luckily that one's built into the name. ANYWAY. We'll put "school" on the metaphorical docket anyway because it might be possible to eke something out of it with sufficient exploration of the concept.


This sprang to mind shortly after reading the original quote.

Another route could be to explore this world through the eyes of a family man (or woman? Maybe, though I've not tried writing a female protagonist...), but yeah. Then we could explore the perspective of an adult trying to make a living in this world. Problem is that a family man has a lot of ties, making it difficult to put him into any sort of adventure. Perhaps the severing of those ties is what drives him TO the adventure? *Docket++*

Hmm, who or where else might it be interesting to explore this from... a position of power MIGHT work, though that's inherently difficult due to it adding a need to explore the position as well as the world, and frankly with power comes politics, and writing political drama is one of the darker circles of hell.


---
Will probably start writing and exploring this some later today, either blogging about it later or a day or two from now. In any case, this is a thought process, be afraid, be very afraid, etc etc

Also if anyone has ideas, tell me? It's fun playing around with a concept, especially when there's multiple people on the ball.