You're doing magic fights wrong

Wizard duels in fiction are a staple of the fantasy genre. Unfortunately, they often suck. In this article, i will attempt to show why this is the case, and how to avoid it.

The main problem lies with a lack of imagination. Wizards are basically reality warpers, and yet they spend most of their time during fights shooting fireballs and raising magical shields to block their opponents fireballs. Boring. What is this, laser tag?

Instead, they should be using the environment(and their imagination) to it's fullest potential. For example, turning the floor beneath their opponents' feet to ice. Heating up something their opponent is holding to make them drop it. Creating a smoke cloud around their opponent's head to prevent them from seeing. Heck, they're wizards, why can't they just forcibly stop their opponent's heart with magic?

In star wars, they have something called "force shields" that prevent jedi from being directly acted upon by their enemy's force powers. This is why jedi don't usually just choke each other in fights. Perhaps the same thing could apply to magic duels.

But even with that, there's still a ton of options. Why shoot fireballs when you can just set your opponent on fire directly? If you can't do that, set the area around them on fire. Ambient heat will still do a number on them. Collapse the ceiling above them. Blow something up near them and nail them with the shrapnel. There are so many options, but they're never used.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the most exciting wizard duel of the series takes place. It involves snape fighting mcgonagall, and actually has some clever ideas. Mcgonagall shoots daggers at snape, snape turns them into birds and makes them attack mcgonagall instead(or something, i don't quite remember it, but it was something like that). And then we get treated to boring "stupefy"(stunning spell) "protego"(shield spell) loops. Oh, well. At least we got one good fight.

A common trope in wizard duels, and one that, in my opinion, conveys a severe lack of imagination, is the battle of will. This is basically like the harry potter and voldemort's wands connecting and they have to "concentrate" really hard to force their opponent to lose. However, it's unclear what exactly they will gain by doing this.
Inevitably, the hero wins, without having to use almost any creativity at all. Unfortunately, this is common in many forms of battle in fiction, not just magic fights, but that's for another post.

What about defense? In magic fights, things could go south very quickly for people that can't think on their feet, so how would you defend against some of the attacks mentioned above? Well, if the floor turned to ice, you could dry it, removing the layer of moisture between it and your feet and thus removing the slipperyness. If they blew something up near you, you could use a simple shield to block the shrapnel. If they created a smoke cloud, you could dissipate it with a gust of wind.

Something many people fail to take into account is that at least half of any battle is psychological. Trickery and deception have been used countless times through history, to great effect. For example, in the american revolution, several soldiers disguised a log as a cannon to scare british troops into surrendering. They didn't even have to fire a shot. The best way to win a fight is to ensure that there won't be one.

In a magic fight, this might involve manipulating your opponents' mind, making them too afraid to fight or too sleepy to concentrate. If there's something that prevents you from directly manipulating them, you could make it into a colorless gas cloud that your opponent will breathe without even realizing it. We can do that even without magic, so it should be relatively simple to do it with magic.

Everything has a weakness, you just have to think differently. For example, in Stargate Sg-1, the military encounters a super soldier that is immune to all their weapons, and even explosions. How they eventually defeated it? Well, the first time, they used tranquilizer darts to make it lose conciousness, and later, they developed a weapon that literally causes them to have a heart attack. Now that's creativity.

Imagine that someone has armor that is too hard to be penetrated by any weapon. How would you kill them? Here's some ideas: Drowning, hunger, thirst, suffocation, falling from a great height, heart failure, sickness, etc. Heck, you don't even need to kill them. Just encase them in a viscous, jello-like liquid and they won't even be able to move.

So that's my ideas on how to make magical fights more interesting. It got a little rambly there at times, but i hope it was still helpful. If you have any responses at all, please leave a comment with your thoughts on this article, such as perhaps what you liked, didn't like, what i could change, etc. Thanks for reading this, and have a good day!

That wasn't an order, by the way. Having a good day is optional.

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Hello, close family member, friend i shamelessly advertised to, or possibly random person who clicked on this link by accident! I’m PlasmaMuffin(also known as neoselket), and i run this trainwreck i have the gall to call a blog.
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