Made of Magic

"It is made of magic. Raw magic. Solidified. Curdled. Renewed from second to second. Could you imagine a better substance to build the new home of sourcery?"

— Coin describing his Mage Tower, Sourcery

When something or someone is literally made of magic, or at least an equivalent.

This shouldn't be confused with Made of Phlebotinum (i.e "Phlebotinum Runs The World"), where 'magic' makes the setting work at all (it does count if the setting itself is made of magic). You may occasionally find someone to be Made Of Evil Magic. A Place of Power is usually made of magic, as well as many supernatural beings.

Creatures that are made of magic may in fact be a Pure Magic Being, or an Energy Being, depending on whether the setting has more of a Science Fiction or a Fantasy flavor. In a Science Fantasy setting, the creature might be both.

They are most likely very dependent on mana to exist. If the setting is chock-full, no problem. If not....

Anti-Magic (or worse, Magic Eater) characters/things are often the bane of this character/thing.

Compare Born of Magic, Pure Energy, Hard Light and The Power of Creation.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Bleach: The entire Shinigami-world is made from 'spirit particles', making those skills that rely on absorbing said particles many times more powerful. There's some fairly nifty scenes where you can see nearby walls and buildings slowly dissolving as the particles are absorbed and redirected into an attack...
• A Certain Magical Index: Certain beings (phenomenons, individuals) are made of AIM-field. Most of the time they spontaneously come into existence. You can't have so many Espers (and Mages) living so close together, all practicing so much crazy powers, and not expect some feedback.
• To become Magical Girl in The Demon Girl Next Door involves having one's body restructured to be primarily made of ether, enhancing their strength and making them able to better use magic. As a consequence, however, if their magical power ever gets too low, the magic holding their body together will fail and they'll dissipate into the air, becoming a disembodied soul.
• In Dragon Ball, this is said to be the origin of Majin Buu, who was conjured into existence by an extremely powerful wizard named Bibidi. It's later revealed that Majin Buu has apparently always existed and Bibidi merely summoned him. Not even the gods know what Buu truly is, but the part about him being made of magic remains true.
• The Servants (Heroic Spirits) in Fate/stay night and Fate/Zero are made of Mana, and will disappear when their Master can no longer channel Mana into them, such as when Lancelot kills Kariya by overdraining the latter's Mana. A lesser version of this are the Homunculus, such as Irisviel and her daughter Ilyasviel, who are walking circuits of magic in the shape of human beings.
• The Living Programs (including Wolkenritter and Materials) in the Lyrical Nanoha series are constructs made out of magical energy. Also, the Unison Devices are probably thus, too.
• The Magical World, and most residents in Negima! Magister Negi Magi, are made of magic. This makes them vulnerable to beings able to manipulate their substance. (And gives the heroes a resistance since they're made of "mundane" matter.)

Comic Books

• Green Lantern: Hal Jordan recreates his destroyed hometown of Coast City using his power ring.

Fan Works

• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Everything inside a dungeon (except water, dirt, and stone/ore) is manifested dungeon mana. As a result of this, dungeon creatures dissolve into mana when killed and everything in the dungeon dissolves if taken out of the dungeon. The exceptions to this are: 1) dirt, water, and stone, which are actual parts of the planet reshaped to make up the dungeon's structure, 2) anything created on the surface (such as the deco bugs spawned on the surface by Taylor's first-floor global effect or the creatures spontaneously generated by released dungeon mana), 3) anything created by the loot system (such as the contents of the Inexplicable Treasure Chests or the loot that creatures sometimes drop when killed), and 4) Harvesters (humans who can spend some of their own mana to make things in a dungeon fully real).
• Oversaturated World: Oversaturation: The crystal of Twilight's crystal castle is actually "solid harmony magic".
• The Palaververse: From Treasures, it's implied, due to the Intangibility of the resultant "body" and the use of magic in its creation, along with the magic-related word "aether", and "corp" as in "body" being a part of it, that "transaetheric incorporation" is related to giving a body made of magic to a mind.

Literature

• Caraval: The Isla de Los Sueños is an ordinary island during the day, but is transformed into the magnificent, dream-like Caraval grounds at night using copious amounts of magic.
• In The Cosmere, Investiture is capable of taking on various forms on the Physical and Cognitive realms (it usually exists in the Spiritual Realm), and large quantities of it that don't attach to a living host end up developing sentience after a while. Shards in particular turn their Vessels into pure Investiture.
  • Spren in The Stormlight Archive. They are tiny pieces of power from one or more gods, given a kind of life by people's emotions and thoughts. Some are essentially animals in their own Realm while others are intelligent enough to have a society. Also, at least some of the intelligent ones can form bonds with humans that allow the spren to maintain their intelligence when manifesting in the Physical Realm, and give the human magical powers.
  • Shardblades are made of solid investiture, which is why they can cut through anything easily except other Shardblades, Shardplate (which is also made of Investiture), and aluminum. They're actually spren that have fully entered the physical world in the shape of weapons and armor.
  • Seons in Elantris (and also Skaze in other works set on the planet Sel) are basically the same thing as Roshar's Spren.
  • In Mistborn, the metal Atium is the body of the god Ruin in physical form, and the mists are the body of Preservation.
• Everything in the magical world in Dark Lord of Derkholm contains magic to the point that people from another world were digging up dirt in that world and smuggling it into their magic-less world to do magic (and make a lot of cash).
• Discworld isn't made of magic, but it is explicitly noted in the novel The Last Hero that without magic the turtle would die, the seas run dry, the sun burn out and crash, and the elephants would cease to exist altogether. And that would happen within a few seconds of magic ceasing to exist.
  • A more direct example is the tower Coin constructs in Sourcery which is literally willed into being from magic made solid:
  Coin: It is made of magic. Raw magic. Solidified. Curdled. Renewed from second to second. Could you imagine a better substance to build the new home of sourcery?
  • That one turns out to have a pretty major drawback at the climax, however, when Coin suddenly needs to call upon a lot of magical power at once...
• In The Dresden Files, the Nevernever and all its inhabitants are this.
• In the Harry Potter series, a Patronus charm cast at full power produces a luminous animal guardian that wards off Dementors.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Every part of a dragon's physiology are made of magic, making them prime targets for poachers.
• Iron Widow: The "spirit metal" that makes up hundun bodies, Humongous Mechas, and pilot armor is actually crystallized qi. A person with powerful qi can link to spirit metal and mentally control it, a property that lets it double as Mecha-Enabling Phlebotinum.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: As said in the first story, apparently how Gwen's endless quiver of arrows works, by making the arrows from magic:
  The magically produced arrow shaft flickered and disappeared, no longer necessary.
• The Princess Series features the Seven Dwarves as living representations of elements, the last of which is magic.
• The Scholomance: "Mals" are monsters that form out of magic and feed on wizards' mana (and on wizards themselves). They range from tiny but lethal pests to titanic Blob Monsters and are diverse enough that wizards only bother to name a few of the common varieties. Though some reproduce through pseudo-natural means like laying eggs, others manifest spontaneously whenever Black Magic is used.
• In the Young Wizards series Nita's charm bracelet, which allows her to store pre-cast spells, is a complicated structure of magical energy made tangible by giving it "virtual mass". And one of those pre-cast spells, which produces a terawatt particle beam, tangibly manifests as a laser rifle.

Live-Action TV

• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Aida creates her human body out of the Darkhold's magic.
• In Merlin (1998), a wide variety of creatures including Queen Mab are this. And, in that setting, magic is definitely Clap Your Hands If You Believe...
• In Merlin (2008), Merlin himself qualifies. Of course, since this is not a setting where Gods Need Prayer Badly, he'll be immortal until the second age of King Arthur.
• In Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Amazing Mystico and Janet put up blocks of flats using the power of hypnosis.
  Of course they're safe. There's absolutely no doubt about that. They are as strong, solid and as safe as any other building method in this country. Provided of course people believe in them.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Outsiders are beings from Alternate Dimensions called the Outer Planes and are made from their respective magical birthplaces. Pre-4th edition, they were:
    • Fiends as a whole are made from the lower planes, with Demons, Yugoloths, and Devils coming from the Abyss, Gray Waste, and Baator respectively.
    • Angels and other celestial beings come from the upper planes, with Archons, Guardinals and Eladrin coming from Mount Celestia, Elysium, and Arborea respectively. Angels uniquely can come from any of the celestial planes, and have no infernal counterpart.
  • Living Spells, as the name suggests, are spells that have taken on a life of their own.
  • Grisgols are made of magical items assembled as a humanoid body.
• Exalted: Everything, from the lowliest mortal, to the Unconquered Sun, from the most solid center of Creation, to the pure chaos of the Wyld, is made of Essence.
• Mage: The Ascension: Will Workers can learn to make artifacts and creatures out of the raw stuff of magic when they've learned the upper levels of the Prime sphere.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Everything (save for Planeswalkers) is a magical construct. According to Wizards' Magi Babble, every card you play are Mana-based magical copies of beings encountered or studied by the Planeswalker that the player takes the role of. (Prior to this Retcon they were the real thing, summoned and enslaved by your might. Guess that made some players feel bad.)
  • In-universe, outside of matches/Planeswalker battles, certain beings are living manifestations of the planes' mana. Angels and demons are manifestations of White and Black mana respectively, as are a few other beings such as archons, specters, and certain kinds of elementals. Gods are also living manifestations of their planes' magical forces. As a result of being so closely tied to the magic of their home worlds, these beings cannot become planeswalkers.
  • The Eldrazi are made of colorless mana, since the spirit dragon Ugin fed them his colorless Ghostfire to trap them in physical forms that could be sealed away. Prior to this, the Eldrazi were bodiless malevolent entities that wandered the Blind Eternities.
  • The Aetherborn of Kaladesh are the ones who are as mayflies in that particular setting, because they're made of the inherent magical energy that permeates the plane and quickly leak it, thus losing their life force in short order.
• Warhammer:
  • Daemons are composed of pure magic — the raw substance of Chaos itself. Fortunately for others, this means that they can't stay for long in realspace, and can only temporarily manifest for as long as they have a source of magical or psychic power to draw from or if the walls between realities wear especially thin.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Realmstone is a magical substance that forms wherever the magic that defines one of the eight Mortal Realms becomes concentrated enough to solidify into a tangible stubstance; thus, in Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, particularly high concentrations of ambient fire magic have a chance of fossilizing into Brightstone, which can be used as fuel for very potent acts of pyromancy. This material is rare, valuable, and incredibly unstable and dangerous, and each of the Realms has a different kind of Realmstone that has different effects (the aforementioned Brightstone might make people around it irrationally angry, for instance, or simply explode if handled improperly).

Video Games

• AdventureQuest Worlds: Ledgermayne, the Seventh Lord of Chaos, is a being of chaorrupted mana incarnate.
• BlazBlue: Araune Was Once a Man, but overexposure to the Boundary has turned him into a gibbering blob of liquid sethir. Celica's ability to erode sethir makes Arakune panic and feel sick whenever she's near him. Terumi also feels sick from this effect as well, implying that his ghost form is also a pure magic being.
• Dungeon Keeper: Unlike other units, the Keeper creates Imp Worker Units with a spell. Also, in the sequel, each living Imp slightly reduces the Keeper's mana regeneration rate, and Imps spontaneously manifest if the Keeper owns fewer than four.
• The Elder Scrolls: With the Conjuration school of magic, a mage can summon weapons and companions made of magic.
• Final Fantasy VI: Espers, which is a very bad thing since the Big Bad makes himself into the god of magic. Also several enemies, most notably the Ultima / Atma weapon and everything in the Cult of Kefka tower, meaning they die if their MP are depleted.
• Heroes of Might and Magic III: Armageddon's Blade : Magic Elementals are Elemental Embodiments of magic.
• League of Legends has Xerath, the Magus Ascendant, who Was Once a Man before undergoing a ritual to ascend beyond his physical form, and while the "ascension" part was successful, he proved so dangerous that he was partly sealed into an enchanted tomb, resulting in him being a vaguely humanoid shape of blue arcane energy held together by pieces of a metal sarcophagus-like device. Later retcons integrated his lore into general Shuriman "Ascended" — under normal circumstances, a successful Ascension results in the person becoming an almighty half-animal person, but Xerath 1) wasn't "destined" for the ritual, and 2) his ritual went catastrophically wrong in its own right, resulting in his highly corrupted form.
• The Secret World: Emma Smith is a little girl with the ability to manipulate raw anima. Her real name is literally Anima, and she is one of Gaia's most powerful servants. After she was found as the Sole Survivor of a fire, one of the firefighters misheard her when she gave her name and assumed it was Emma. This is why the Orochi Group, especially Lilith, is after her.
• Undertale: All monsters are composed of magic, in contrast to humans being made mostly of physical matter. Because monsters are magical beings, they instantly turn to dust when they die and their souls are weak compared to a human's soul.
• Valkyrie Profile: The Valkyrie employ souls of dead warrior re-materialized in the world with Divine Materialization Energy. So while in the world, they are made of Divine magic. That this includes the Valkyrie is an important point in the game, beyond being able to heal her with things that heal materialized Einherjars.
• The World Ends with You: Every entity that exists in the UG is made of matter called Soul.
• World of Warcraft: Anveena is the human form of the Sunwell. The Sunwell is literally nothing BUT a mass of huge magical energy. It also serves as the key to allow Kil'jaeden and other Burning Legion nasties into the world, but Anveena was having none of this and killed herself to stop it all (the portal was already open at the time, her death would close it). After, an alien prophet used the spark of a dead Energy Being angel to 'revive' the Sunwell, but Anveena stayed 'dead'.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: Susan's summoned objects are actually temporary magical copies of the items in her chest, and not the transported items themselves.
• Roommates: Jareth's Crystal Balls and the Erlkönig's Power Crystals aren't props but literal magic spells.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Mana is both Life Energy and the fuel for magic. There's a race of Energy Being called Anodites who are literally made of the stuff. So is the dimension known as Ledgerdomain, the Magical Land and Eldritch Location from which all magic in the Multiverse flows. It's the home of the Mage Species which spawned recurring villains Hex and Charmcaster. It's also home to the Alpha Rune, which is inscribed with the true name of magic itself, making its wielder nigh omnipotent, in or out of Ledgerdomain.
• DuckTales (2017): Lena, the Living Shadow of Magica De Spell. Initially, she can only exist with the aid of Magica's amulet of shadow magic, but she gradually becomes able to tap into her own magic, eventually seemingly severing her from the amulet and Magica totally.
• When Gargoyles introduces the concept of the Third Race, Goliath describes them as "creatures of pure magic," which explains why they're so much more powerful than even very skilled human or gargoyle mages.
• Aku, the Big Bad of Samurai Jack, is made of a piece of the elemental chaos of the universe. Also, Jack's sword is made of the goodness of his father.
• In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Glossaryck and the members of the Magical High Commission are described as being made from magic, as presumably are the millhorses and other beings living inside the Magic Wand. As a result, in the series finale they all die when magic is destroyed.

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