What's Up with All the Magic Superpowers? (Part 1 - A Good Concept)
Hello, all. Welcome to the final Recent Reads post of 2025.
Back in early November, when reviewing Alchemy of Secrets, I commented that magic systems that are functionally just superpowers annoy me. That’s not to say that this is an inherently bad approach to doing magic. It’s just, from the examples of this system that I’ve seen or heard about, I feel like it has become a crutch, one that some authors end up breaking because they mistake it for a forklift.
This editorial interlude will be split into four parts. The first two parts, releasing this week, will discuss magical superpowers as a concept, with us discussing how they can be a useful writing tool today and going into the potential issues with mishandling them on New Years Day. Next week, we’ll look at a couple of case studies to better explore what I believe to be the core problem with how this concept has been implemented lately.
Let’s unleash the power.
DEFINTIONS
First, I should establish what exactly I mean by magic superpowers.
In Fantasy, there are many kinds of magic systems. Most people know about the spectrum of Hard Magic and Soft Magic. However, there is also a matter of range of applications within a magic system.
There are systems where practitioners of magic can unlock a broad array of powers via study, conditioning, or having access to the right tools (Harry Potter, Inheritance, most D&D settings, Magic: the Gathering).
There are systems where magic can only do limited things, but where any practitioner can both learn to do these certain things and also learn to maximize their utilize through ingenuity (Hierarchy, Jade City).
What I’m here to talk about is a odd fusion of these two approaches to range: where the magic system, as a whole, can do a broad array of different things, but where individual practitioners are locked into only using one or two applications of that magic system. They can master their one application, to the point they might seem identical to a specialist within one of the two scenarios described above, except their inability to do things outside of their specialty is coded into the magic system.
A fantastic example of magic superpowers is the world of Avatar. In both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, the magic system of bending has very hard divisions. Each bender (with the exception of the Avatar) is locked into only being able to manipulate one of the four elements, and while anyone with the power of bending can train in their specific element, no one gets a choice about either being a bender or about the element one can bend. The Avatar’s ability to get around the rules and master all four of the elements is something so special within the world that it effectively skews any narrative around the Avatar.
(Believe me, we’ll be coming back to Avatar a lot across both parts of this editorial.)
GOOD IN CONCEPT
Let’s get straight to the point: narratively speaking, superpowers are already indistinguishable from a magic system.
It’s All Magic to Me
When writing any form of speculative fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, etc.), a foundational aspect of the story's premise is that the rules of the narrative’s world operate differently from the commonly accepted rules of our own reality. This takes many forms, dictated by the genre. In Science Fiction, this takes the form of technologies that do not yet exist or theories becoming fact. In Horror, it takes the form of confirmation that the things we fear do objectively exist.
What a Fantasy magic system represents within a narrative is a source of both conflict and solutions - which is what superpowers also do within superhero media. The more that magic or superpowers can help resolve conflicts, the more limitations need to be set for what problems can or can’t be resolved. The same principles for writing them well (and the same pitfalls for writing them poorly) apply to both.
For an example of the shared pitfalls, consider Superman. A common complaint about Superman is that he is so overpowered that he invalidates conflicts. This bottlenecks stories into either threatening him indirectly or else abusing Kryptonite until it has become farcical that everyone has the stuff. This same thing happened at the end of Onyx Storm. Xaden is now so powerful, while also having the motivation to snuff out all of the venin leaders,that Yarros had to slap on the venin bloodlines rule just to keep him from instantly ending the series.
This is just what happens when things go badly. There are plenty of stories where superheroes who have supposedly scientific origins are functionally identical to magical creatures. In the most extreme case, you get Spider-Man, who not only has multiversal variants whose powers are magical in origin but also is connected to the mystical force known as the Web of Life and Destiny. At the level of narrative functionality, the only reason that most superheroes aren’t magic is that the genre tells us they aren't magical, much the same way that the powers of the Jedi aren't called magic.
All this is to say that, if superhero stories can work on this sort of system, there’s no reason that this system can't also work in a Fantasy story set within a created world.
The Advantage of Magical Superpowers
One of the challenges when writing a magic system is avoiding loopholes and destabilizing synergies. The more lore and more powers that an author adds to a magic system, the greater the likelihood that something will be introduced that should invalidate the narrative and make the world unrecognizable. These issues do not necessarily lie with the magic system itself. Instead, the issue is often the fact that no one within the world seems to have realized an exploit that the audience can easily identify
I could go after Harry Potter here, but instead, I’m actually going to highlight a problem in Avatar’s bending system that I haven't seen people talk about. The finale of The Last Airbender established that energybending can:
Take away a person’s bending abilities.
Transfer knowledge, including knowledge of how to use energybending.
Fast forward to The Legend of Korra, and we learn that energybending can restore lost bending … followed soon after by the revelation that energybending is how humans gained power over the elements in the first place. So why are Tension and his children the only airbenders at the start of the sequel series? Why did Aang, across the 53 years of his life between the two shows, not attempt to use energybending on Air Acolytes to create new airbenders? (I don't care if a comic explains this. Supplemental materials should not be needed to patch holes in the primarily canon materials.)
Why is this relevant to magical superpowers comes into this? It’s because they provide a shortcut by which a writer can avoid these problems without needing to constantly evaluate every new element added to the magic system.
Compartmentalization
By compartmentalizing magic in the form of superpowers that are restricted to individuals, loopholes can be closed and synergies can be prevented.
This isn’t a guarantee, of course (as the energybending example shows). However, it’s a lot more understandable that characters within the world haven’t broken the magic system when the elements that could break the magic system are kept apart, split between people who don’t have any mechanism to combine their abilities. This also allows rare, exotic abilities to be implented without begging the question of why people can’t just make them more common through research. Sometimes, an ability is only available to one special person who may simply not be available to solve a relevant problem.
For example, taking things back to Avatar, lavabending is a horrifically devastating ability that can allow one bender to lay waste to entire cities. The Last Airbender controlled this by making it a power than only the Avatar could use, combining firebending and earthbending with the help of the Avatar State. When The Legend of Korra introduced lavabenders as a rare subset of earthbenders, it was made clear that this was an innate talent, which at least restricted the ability of the technique to propagate (unlike what happened with metalbending). Treating lavabending as a special superpower preemptively addressed by the Earth Kingdom isn't dominating the world with lavabenders, thereby allowing characters like Ghazan and Bolin to exist without shattering the setting.
Limitations
On a related note to compartmentalization, magical superpowers introduce easily understood limits to an individual’s ability to solve problems. You don't expect a person with fire powers to be able to heal people, even if healing magic exists in the setting. You also wouldn't expect the healer to hurl fireballs. There are surprises and exceptions to this, of course - Sky Shielder presented magical healing that is more skin to general biokinesis, while The Legend of Korra showed that firebending can at least be used to read a person’s spiritual energies - but if magical superpowers are used correctly, then these exceptions either follow clear internal logic or reflect a creative use of powers within common-sense limits.
RESPECT THE SHORTCUT
Magical superpowers are not a bad idea - but they do have their limits. Like any shortcut, this one can only be traversed safely when one respects those limits. So New Year’s Day, we will discuss the dangers that come from not respecting the limits, as well as breaking down some examples that drive close to the edge but still manage to stay on the road.
Thank you all for joining me today and for this past year. Please subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a Happy New Year.
