{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/essays/reductionism-vow",
  "path": "/posts/essays/reductionism-vow",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-21T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "; foreword\n\n: It's surprising to realize how little I've discussed worldbuilding\non this site.  All those essays about prose and plot and character,\nbut any long-time fan of my work knows that my real passion is lore. \n\n  I have plenty of opinions on how to best go about fleshing out a\n  setting, with a particular emphasis on the mechanics of its\n  speculative elements --- which no doubt explains the length of this\n  essay.  Originally, I only wanted to dash off a quick tumblr post,\n  but I kept hitting on things I wanted to express and realized I\n  never had, not publicly.\n\n  But with... quite a bit further ado actually, let's get this essay\n  started.\n\n; related\n: - [](/essays/creative-extrapolation.html)\n  - [Reductionist Magic 1: The Problem][sgm]\n  - [nostalgebraist's counterpoint to rational fiction][nost]\n\n[sgm]: https://sablegm.substack.com/p/reductionist-magic-1-the-problem\n[nost]: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/685824316587343872\n\nIntroduction\n\nThis evening, as I am wont to do, I found myself thinking about\nreductionist magic.  It's my favorite way to design fantasy magic\nsystems.  Hard magic is rather in vogue these days --- clear and\nspecific rules, wizards akin to scientists of arcana and engineers of\nspells.\n\nWhy?  Contrivance is unsatisfying in narratives --- resolving a plot\nby deus ex machina is bad, and what fundamental difference is there,\nbetween \"How was the villain thwarted? Because the gods willed it,\" and\n\"How can wizards cast spells? Because the gods will it,\" ultimately?\n\nThus, hard magic serves as a balm for what is both a real problem and\na persistent anxiety in writers.  To resolve plots with magic, the\nreader needs to understand both the power and stakes of what magic\ndoes.\n\nBrooms exist to solve a real problem: Dust and detritus accumulates on\nthe floor the longer you live within a space, so you push it into\npiles and throw it away.  Or, what comes first, your parents tell you\nto clean up your room, then check to see if your floor is actually\nclean.\n\nIf the problem a child thinks they're solving is clearing up the\nfloor, why not sweep trash under a rug where no one can see it?  But\nlooking clean isn't the important part --- food crumbs, for\ninstance, will rot and attract pests.  Hiding them doesn't fix this.\n\nThe rise of hard magic comes hand in hand with an impulse toward\navoiding plot holes.  In a way, hard magic is just an exercise in\namending the same sort of error, but located in the backplot and the\nworldbuilding --- lore holes, if you will, though that sounds almost\nlurid.\n\nThese holes come in two chief varieties --- lacuna and aporia.\n\nAporia is what everyone recognizes as a plot hole. Here, the text says\nX.  There, the text says not-X.  These cannot both be true, hence\ncontradiction.\n\nSay a fantasy party sets off on a quest to recover the lost remains of\na legendary heroine, which are necessary to revive her and defeat a\ngrand evil. An early encounter goes terribly wrong, they find\nthemselves facing death at the daggers of a trio of goblins --- but\nthen a wizard arrives to save the party with a timely casting of\nfireball, incinerating the fiends and leaving only charred skeletons.\n\nLater, deep in the lows of the second act, tensions reach a breaking\npoint as conflicting motivations tear the party apart.  Suddenly, the\nwizard casts a traitorous fireball that incinerates the love of the\nprotagonist's life.  There's no way to revive her now --- the fireball\nhad burnt so hot there's nothing remaining but ash on the wind.  The\nprotagonist falls to their knees and weeps at this grand tragedy.\n\nTragedy? I say farce.  If the fireball is so hot it burns bones, then\nwhy did we see the goblin's skeletons earlier?  Gotcha!\n\nIn practice, aporia is not what people call plot holes.  Make no\nmistake, it happens: the sloppy writing of popular media is full of\nthese slips. But how do you recognize plot holes?  You first notice\nthat you're confused; something doesn't add up.  This doesn't make\nsense to me.\n\nThis brings us to lacunae. Consider this new narrative: First, we see\na off-duty police officer take out a gun from his safe and slip it into\nhis pocket. We watch him take a walk into the misty night, crickets\nchirruping an eerie ambient drone.  As he passes in front of an alley,\ngrah!  A monster looms out of the darkness.\n\nThe cop turns tail and runs.\n\nDoes this make sense?  There's no apparent contradiction.  No, the\nissue isn't what happens, it's what doesn't happen.  If the cop is\nscared, if he's fearing for his life, why doesn't he reach for his gun\nand shoot?  We know he has one.  Did he forget?  Did the author?\n\nSo if aporia is the presence of logical contradictions deriving from\nsupposed premises, then lacuna is the absence of the logical\nconsequences of those premises.\n\nBut every dichotomy is just a spectrum with a lack of imagination.\n\nThere's a reason it's so natural to call both these things \"plot\nholes.\"  The contradiction buried in the cowardly cop example is we\nnaturally assume a police officer would try to defend himself if\nfeeling threatened --- he's got the training and he's armed.  Media\nliteracy means parsing and engaging with this kind of subtext.\n\nBut that's the rub: it's all interpretation.  We don't know, so we\nhave to infer.  Was the traitor fireball really contradictory? Maybe\nthe wizard simply poured more power into the spell against a human\nthan against goblin.\n\nConsider the following:\n\n- There are five boxes in a circle, each with one marble inside.\n- Marbles come in three colors and at least one of each is present.\n- No box is immediately beside a box with a marble of the same color.\n- Two of the marbles are blue.\n- There are more red marbles than green.\n- No green marble box sits to the immediate left of a red marble box.\n\nGot all that?  Now imagine I unveil a red marble.  You aren't\nsurprised; the rules say as much.  Then I unveil the box to its\nright.  It's blue.\n\nProbably you don't blink.  If you were a logically omniscient\ncomputer, though, you'd segfault.\n\nTry it yourself, it's not hard to construct a sequence that matches\nthese rules.  Quickly you'll find yourself locked into a single valid\nsequence.  And the result is not a configuration that has a blue box\nto the right of a red box!\n\nEasy for you to guess this much, just pagescrolls above we were\ntalking about contradictions. But would you have blinked if this\npuzzle had showed up in a fantasy story --- instead of marbles, it's\nthe stones of power needed to activate mystical array?  What happens\nif the rules were dripfed to you over the course of an arc, each\nestablished in a different scene?\n\nThe contradiction only emerges when you combine all of these\nconstraints together, then spend an additional minute working through\nthe implications.\n\nIn some ways this is close kin to an aporia --- it's explicit\ncontradiction among what we're shown --- but this type of multi-step\nreasoning is what it takes to finish drawing an equivalence between\nthe two.\n\nTo derive true contradiction from a lacuna is much like getting\npartway through a sudoku puzzle and realizing you've fucked up. In\nsudoku, you can rule out certain numbers by direct application of the\nrules, while other remain in an ambiguous superposition, but if you\nalign enough superpositions, you discern certain permutations of\nstates are contradictory and the others share implications.  Sometimes,\nthrough the cloud of possibility, you discern that no matter what's\nreally happening over here, every permutation places the same\ncontraint over there. If you rule out what's impossible and nothing\nremains, the lacuna was truly vacuous.\n\nIt's worse than I let on --- this isn't just a spectrum, there are\ntwo spectrums.  It's a plot hole polical compass!\n\n<table><tr><td>Not aporetic nor lacunal ---<br>\nyou  just lack reading\ncomprehension.</td>    \n\n<td>Not aporetic, yet lacunal ---<br>\nit's unclear, but ripe for interpretation</td></tr>\n\n<tr><td>Aporetic, yet not lacunal ---<br>\nthe author forgot their own rules.</td>\n\n<td>Both aporetic and lacunal ---<br>\nyou are in hell.</td></tr></table>\n\nThis isn't an essay about plot holes, though lore holes will figure\nheavily in what's to come.\n\nIt's clear enough that we want to avoid confusing the reader, and to\ndo that we need to think carefully about what we include in our worlds\nand what this implies.\n\nBut what are we really accomplishing, when we strain to avoid plot\nholes?  There's a related concept, couched in the same kind of quippy\nTvTropes lingo --- fridge logic.  It's when you watch a show, then\nonce you step away to get a drink from the fridge, the implications\nhit you, and you go wait, what?\n\nBut if a story passes the sniff test while you're watching and it only\nfalls apart later, hasn't it done its job entertaining you?  Only a\nsubset of readers go on the internet to rant about plot holes --- and\ncrucially, you can always find narrative holes if you run far enough\ndown the chains of logical implication, because the root of every\nstory is a falsehood.  None of this ever happened!\n\nPart of what distinguishes aporia from lacuna is that one is\ncharitable and one is adversarial.  Aporia is a case where you get\nstung simply by believing what the story told you, taking it on own\nterms.  Lacuna involves asking questions the author did not.  This is\nimportant --- unconscious biases are worth examining --- but at a\ncertain point you're just buying clothes at the soup store.\n\nWe're here to talk about hard magic --- adding rules and limits to\nmake our spells more logical and believable.  We do this because it's\nmore satisfying, less confusing --- and to accomplish this, we might\nfirst try preëmptively thinking like a critic.  Whether developing a\nplot development or expositing lore, at each point you imagine a\nreader who incisively asks, \"Wait, does that really make sense?  Why?\nHow?\"\n\nBut watch out!  This is why I mentioned sweeping things under the\nrug.  Only asking yourself whether you can satisfy readers ",
  "title": "The Binding Vow of Reductionism"
}