Basic Trope: A setting where Magic A Is Magic A features a character whose abilities do not follow the normal rules.
- Played Straight: In a world with Vancian Magic, where mages can use a limited number of spells per day which have a single purpose and need to be prepared ahead of time, Alice can use Ki Manipulation to fight, giving her greater flexibility at a cost of raw power.
- Exaggerated:
- In a world where all superpowers are enhancements to the user's normal physical abilities, Bob can shoot fireballs.
- There are no normal rules. Magic works differently for everyone who uses it.
- Downplayed: Magic requires a wand to cast; Claire, and only Claire, doesn't need a wand, but she still has to follow all the other limitations of magic.
- Justified:
- Alice is from an Alternate Universe, and kept her abilities since Ki is inherent to the body.
- Alice is from the Jade Empire, where Ki Manipulation is commonly practiced.
- Bob is a Human Alien, and his powers are a function of his biology.
- Subverted:
- Alice's abilities actually are magic, just a form that hadn't been discovered before.
- Bob has no powers, and uses flamethrowers hidden underneath his armor.
- Double Subverted: Bob developed his miniature flamethrowers with his real power, super-intelligence, which breaks the rule that all powers are physical in nature.
- Zig-Zagged: It's revealed that isn't a power, he's just really smart. But then it's revealed he can control flames, he just can't create them.
- Parodied: Claire's ability to cast magic without a wand makes her a target for evildoers convinced that it's a sign of incredible power, despite the fact that it's just a convenience at best and she isn't that good of a mage.
- Averted: Magic A Is Magic A, and there are no exceptions.
- Enforced: An executive decides that flashier powers would sell more comics, so he has the writers introduce Bob, a character with fire powers, in a comic whose setting had previously forbidden them.
- Implied: The aftermath of Bob's fights always has scorch marks on the walls.
- Lampshaded: "That's impossible. Alice has no aura; she shouldn't be able to use magic at all. How could she be so powerful?"
- "How is she doing that? Someone make her stop, she's scaring me!"
- Invoked: Alice trained in the extremely rare art of Ki in order to surprise enemies who don't know how it works.
- Exploited: Alice takes jobs hunting down powerful and dangerous Anti-Magic users that normal mages can't touch.
- Defied: Those powerful Anti-Magic users hunted down Ki users because they were the only ones that could stop them, and Alice is the last one left.
- Discussed: "Alice, you can't take on the Anti-Mage! No magic technique yet discovered can even scratch him!" "Then it's a good thing I don't use magic."
- Conversed: "Wait, if superpowers in this comic are physical, why can Bob shoot fireballs?" "I guess it's a different type of power than the normal kind?"
- Deconstructed: When Alice is summoned from an alternate universe, she's surprised to find that her Ki Manipulation doesn't work, because the laws of physics are different here. She has to learn the local flavor of magic in order to fight again.
- Reconstructed: However, Alice's experience with Ki giver her a unique perspective on magic that nobody else has, allowing her to quickly become very powerful with it.
- Played for Laughs: The local Cloudcuckoolander can create objects for a quick gag without preparing a spell to do so, but the ability is never used for anything important.
- Played for Drama: The possession of such unheard-of abilities marks Alice or Bob as The Chosen One.
- Played for Horror: Alice and Bob are villains, and the fact that their bodies work on an entirely different set of laws of physics and are immune to "normal" attempts to harm them, marks them as Humanoid Abominations.
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