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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29640
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29640
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

### No, _that_ would not alienate readers.

We've seen this kind of conworld all the way back to Gulliver's Travels, and in more modern form, something like Hogwart's, the TV series Magicians (where they spend most of their time in conworlds), the Sci Fi movie The Fifth Element, and so on.

The first problem all those writers had to overcome is the problem I see in your setup: You need somebody the audience will quickly relate to, as your hero, with motivations, language and beliefs they can relate to. In the stories mentioned; this is typically accomplished with what is called the "stranger in a strange land" idea: We are introduced to Hogwart's and Magic by a magical boy raised as a common boy ("muggle"), so we can see all the wonder through new eyes. Gulliver is our stranger in those stories, Bruce Willis as the grizzled Future New York cab driver is our commoner that catches the magical girl in The Fifth Element. (Flying taxis and high tech are introduced without any explanation needed, modern audiences already accept anything presented and treated (by the characters in the story) as routine high tech machinery: Even holograms, transporters, robots, anti-gravity, etc).

The second major problem I see in your story is failing to address basic ramifications; in this case, plausible control of the magical by the non-magical. To be clear, you don't have to address **every** ramification, but if you don't address the few most likely critiques, your audience cannot suspend their disbelief for very long.

So what prevents a few million super-beings from enslaving the non-magic regular people in your world? To be remotely like Earth, so you can make commentary on real life with your fictional world, you need the bottom 95% of people (billions) to be struggling with systemic poverty, starvation, at war over water and arable land, or religious differences, or power struggles. Why don't a few dozen of the strongest of these magical beings that are _everywhere_ just use their powers to take control? Why worry about genocide if 5000 invulnerable Superman's can just pick them up and put them in prison?

If mages are everywhere, why have they foregone the black magics that could let them take over our corporations, win elections, and control everything?

If I have a superhero on every city block fighting petty crime, then (a) why is there still petty crime? and (b) among non-magical beings who is dumb enough to try and commit it knowing a super-cop is probably patrolling within a quarter mile?

With a tiny fraction of the crime in our world (no theft, muggings, murder, assassination, genocide, nuclear threat, invasion threat, not even secret pollution) how can this world reflect anything about our world?

The **reason** most stories are _"our Earth except where noted"_ (Like "Magicians") is this means the author doesn't have to explain the world to the audience, and there are plenty of regulars they can identify with. Often (even in this series) the heroes are newly aware of the magic (in the series pilot the main protagonist Elliot is astonished to find that the fictional world of Fillary actually exists; that the magical fantasy fiction he was obsessed with is actually a historical record written as a story).

Your work as a writer is to keep a thread in your story with enough touchstones that comforts and teaches the audience how to interpret this world. That is easier with a stranger in your strange land, the exposition needed can be provided by other characters as "explain to the newbie what is happening, or how this works, or why that is true". Without a central "know-nothing" character, you need a substitute or series of substitutes so you aren't engaged in a constant lecture to the audience about why your world is logical. Unfortunately without that logic coming through somehow, you pile up so many **unexplained** story twists that you will exceed your credit limit for suspension of disbelief, and your work goes to waste.

You cannot just handwave that people still have computers, jobs, become doctors and soldiers and cops, if magical people can do all of this better than they can. And you cannot just handwave that millions of beings infinitely more powerful than humans don't go to war with each other, or end up in charge of the nations, corporations, and politics at every level, and for some reason are usually obeying the laws of the humans. Consider that Lex Luthor's intelligence was magically induced, making him a magically evil genius: If I have a million Lex Luthors then Lex Luthors would control all 10,000 or so corporations on the New York Stock Exchange, and every single corporation, bank or corner grocery store in the world. They would control the food supply and every job and acre of land on the planet, all entirely _legally_ by our current laws -- which they would rewrite to suit themselves anyway.

So why isn't that true in your world?

Original score: 2