Magical Mundane

03/24/15

There have so far been two really interesting, really fun pieces of entertainment I have consumed that start off with something magical being applied to a mundane thing.

The first is an anime called, "The Devil is a Part-Timer", in which Satan is transported from a medieval world where he is real to the real world of Tokyo, and becomes an part-time employee at a MgRonald's fast-food restaurant.

The second is a Korean webcomic called, "The Gamer" where a high-school student finds that his life has gained RPG-esque properties:

• A GUI
• Experience and Levels
• Stats
• Quests (chores, homework)
• Notifications

Both concepts are so interesting to me. Both stories ended up going in more magical directions than I was hoping. The Devil is a Part-Timer ended up having epic fights and situations where the devil could transform from his now-human self into his old, powerful self.

The first few episodes had the devil living a normal life as a broke person living in Japan... and it was hilarious. He took his new, dead-end, part-time job super seriously and worked hard to get promoted. He clearly loved his new, unglamourous life, but still had the attitude of a charismatic and tough, "evil" overlord.

And then other supernatural entities found their way to the normal world, and there was super-powered battles and such. Now, don't get me wrong, it was super entertaining and still pretty neat, and well executed, but it lacked that subtlety and that perspective it had of a once-magical being now in a completely ordinary setting. The mundane became a side-show to the main attraction of supernatural forces colliding.

With "The Gamer", a strange magical thing applied itself to a normal person with a normal life. It did not really have any direct change on his life, though, and was not noticed by other people, expect for his changing actions.

But this magic addition was quickly explained and accompanied by the introduction of a huge magical world, and instead of a story of a normal person gaining a game-interface to the real world, it became the story of a normal person gaining a game-interface to a very game-like world.

Again, it's still an interesting, hilarious, fun-filled, and action-packed adventure with an interesting gimmick for the main character, but now all these other magical aspects of this fictional world are coming into play and interacting with his interesting ability, making his condition seem less strange or amazing or otherwise interesting. He is a person with a physics-defying ability in a world full of people with physics-defying abilities.

And so I wonder how different these series would be if that had their beginning concepts, but added nothing else magical or otherwise unordinary. Just this limited magic coming into contact with a very real world. Could such limited fantasy in fact be much more magical? What might we realize about the real world from such magical perspectives?

I want to find out.