In Wanderlust, what is happening in the rest of the world?
The United States of America has a "magic problem" unlike anything ever seen before in the West. This fact is indisputable. It is one of the few instances in which I agree with the uneducated opinions of the masses, though just because it is true does not justify the many injustices of yesterday, nor those that are yet to come.
What is missed by the lawmakers is that America has always had this "magic problem": it is only now a point of contention not because it is getting worse as the result of some terrible moral decline, but because of the rising population of users over the last four centuries. Magic is more visible now than ever before. There are more practitioners, benign or dangerous, than ever before.
But why is it only rising here and not elsewhere? Germany reported stability in its magical population. The United Kingdom is declining in terms of innate aptitude, following the path of our magical forefathers in Egypt, Norway, Ireland and settling down into that steady 0.2% figure we are all intimately familiar with –– the tolerable level of invisibility.
In America, 6% of the population are carriers for the ability – marked as anything above zero on the Kelley Scale, whether they are able to produce so much as a spark themselves or not. Similar rates are recorded for Canada and some countries in South America. Their children may or may not be witches; they could simply be sensitive to the forces at play in this world that most are ignorant to. There is a greater range of outputs, from charlatan mediums working with the barest hint of truth to powerful sorcerers of limitless potential.
To further compound the issue, the well-known phenomena of witches born to entirely non-magical, Kelley 0 parents is recorded only in the United States. And it is consistent. This is a country where outliers are known to occur, and you can no longer trace magical aptitude along genetic lines. It appears random –– and governments, let alone individual families in this nation, do not deal well with random.
CARRINGTON, L. (1973). WITCH-BURNING TO WATERGATE: A HISTORY OF MAGIC IN AMERICA. NEW YORK: HEAVEN PUBLISHING.Â
Written by @decantae, not me!
