Baby-Cursing Ceremonies

[Alicorn]

This is an out-of-context worldbuilding snippet by me and kappa, presented more or less unedited.

Alicorn:
that phrase makes me want to come up with a society in which there is a thing people do explicitly to curse babies for some reason
Kappa:
hahahahahahahaha
<3
Alicorn:
"it's a boy! time to curse him!"
Kappa:
pffffffffffffff
Maybe in this society you get like... hmm
When you go through puberty you gain positive magic roughly equal to the amount of negative magic you had beforehand
no curse, no power; strong curse, lots of power
and if you were previously blessed you become cursed instead
Alicorn:
ooh
Kappa:
So there are people who dedicate themselves to coming up with inventive ways to make strong legitimate curses that will still allow the kid to more or less happily survive their preadolescence XD
Alicorn:
:)
Kappa:
it's at least the power of the curse and not the strength of its actual negative effects that gets inverted into good magic, so like, if you can come up with a way to waste a lot of power on a curse that only mildly inconveniences the kid you're good
but people avoid complex balances of negative and positive effects because if they end up net positive, all that power turns into a semirandom curse when the kid goes through puberty XD

[Adelene]

Alternately, a world where everyone naturally has magic, and cursing removes it, and if you don't curse your baby they turn out to be an Adarian's mom.

[cbhacking]

Hmm... does the positivity/negativity of the magic depend on the individual's tastes? A Joker would presumably consider a Damage Report (http://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/damagereport.shtml) neuro - at least, one they couldn't turn off - a negative, but most people would consider it a positive.

Also curious about the ways in which the curse and blessing interact. Hypothetical curse: you can never learn to read (symbolic representation will never make any sense to you, fine-tune the particulars however you care). Are you more likely to get an equal-but-opposite sort of blessing (can speak and understand any language, for example) than you are to get, say, the ability to fly? Also, one presumes the curse is removes when you gain the positive magic, or the overall effect of magic in your life is net negative if you're cursed at birth and blessed at 13.

WARNING: Next paragraph gets physics-nerdy-in-your-magic...

Also, I'm curious what determines the "power" or "amount" of magic. One might reasonably assume things that correspond to actual real-world power output (strength to lift things, speed to run, etc.) to have an estimable magic level based on the real-world output; if I can reactionlessly exert up to 1000N of force on my body in any direction - this is sufficient for flight, if only barely in my case, and thus without a lot of acceleration because (unless I've got airfoils strapped to my arms) most of my power goes to fighting gravity just to get me into level flight - with no speed limit, this is basically infinite maximum power in the sense of watts (if we limit speeds to the speed of light, then it's about 299.8 GW max power) but in magic could be easily described as being half as strong as somebody who can exert up to 2000N in exactly the same way and ignore relativity. On the other hand, 300GW is a *LOT* of power. Consider instead somebody who can shoot a perfectly-focused 300KW laser (this is vastly more powerful than the industrial lasers used to cut steel; it would be more likely to vaporize a good chunk of it and melt what's around the hole; thermal bloom would set everything flammable nearby on fire); most people would probably call this person more powerful (despite having a max power draw three orders of magnitude lower!) than the guy who can fly but takes a full second for his head to reach the ceiling of an ordinary room from a standing start (without jumping) and would smack into that ceiling unless he (I) spent time on the way up braking, too. Obviously, if the laser-shooter is "more powerful" magically, then "emit focused coherent light" seems to be a more powerful magical ability (regardless of the power of the light emitted) than "arbitrary-direction reactionless drive". Yet you can use my power to drive a sublight (assuming we keep those parts of relatively we can) starship that will reach Proxima Centauri within a human lifetime (or to create a mass driver that can produce extinction-level events); laser-person might be able to transmit messages between star systems, but probably couldn't get *you* there in a reasonable time. Then there's stuff like telepathy; you could probably establish a physical lower bound on the requisite energy needed to determine the number I'm thinking of right now, and if you give it a time span you've established a minimum power output, but I'm guessing it would be tiny. Yet that seems like a pretty powerful magic

One story-wise-reasonable classification of magical power I can see is "utility" (according to whose utility function, though, and does it adapt if that function changes?) but that makes it hard to create a powerful curse which does not truly suck for the cursed.

This may be why I should never write fantasy. It's a lot easier to engage suspension of disbelief when I'm reading / watching something (though I may still nitpick afterward) than it is when I try to create fiction.

[cbhacking]

Also, this world has frightening potential for horrible time discounting. Birth blessing: baby is a medical supergenius that can cure cancer! They've probably got ~12 years to work on it, depending on how much knowledge and ability to communicate it they start with. The rest of their life will be awful, but hey, if you need a cancer cure ASAP...

Oh, and what happens if you prevent puberty through magical/surgical/hormonal shenanigans? Do they reverse their birth magic at what "would have been" the right time (in quotes because this is of course something that can already be determined by the environment), or keep it forever, or what?

[Kappa]

Amount of magic required to get something done and amount of physical energy required to get the thing done don't have to strongly correlate with each other, and neither of them has to strongly correlate with the ultimate usefulness of the thing. But for narrative reasons, magic power is likely to track usefulness more closely than it tracks physical energy.

The curse does actually transform into positive magic, and doesn't stick around afterward.

I was envisioning this as sort of a fairytaleish thing because of context, so everything is a bit squishy around the edges.

I think my vague idea was that your inverted curse has an amplifying effect on your ability to do magic generally as well as producing some specific semirandom blessing that is probably but not necessarily somehow related to at least one aspect of the curse.

I have no idea what happens if you prevent puberty.

[Bluelantern]

I am now vaguely picturing a situation with a kind of magic similar to this where an Miles get hit with an effect that causes bones to grow slowly and hard to heal, plus an bonus effect that makes them harder, when the effect is reversed he gets breakable bones that heal quickly, but stays short.