The idea of magic that doesn’t follow human ideas is something I’ve given some idle thought to in the past. Stretching back to before I started Worm, I believe.

Worm lowkey does do something kind of like that with some of its powers, though it’s nowhere near as extreme as the sort of examples I’ve been thinking about, and Worm’s examples of this do still make sense from a certain human perspective.

No, what I’ve been thinking about is things like this: What if magic’s idea of what is or is not part of a whole is different from ours?

What if you try to turn a rock into a top hat, and your magic thinks the head and left shoulder of the man who is currently balancing the rock on his head, as well as a chunk of the air around him, is part of the rock? If the spell worked, you’d end up with a top hat balancing on the blood-gushing, headless torso of what used to be your wizarding assistant.

Whoops.

And magic might not even have a good grasp on what a top hat is. Usually with transmutation magic in particular, this part is explained by way of the caster picturing the target item in their head, but what if magic didn’t know enough about top hats to correctly fill in the blanks of the things the caster didn’t explicitly picture? What if the caster didn’t consider what material the top hat should be, and it ended up being made of iron, or lava? I guess the poor assistant’s body can’t get any more dead, at least.

And even if the caster did picture it as made of silk or something, how is magic supposed to know what we humans mean by “silk”? Or how the hat’s silk is supposed to be treated to make the whole thing stick together? 

Basically, what I’m getting at here is that magic is distinctly fictional because it almost always works conveniently, even when it’s not easy to use it. It follows human ideas because magic that doesn’t follow human ideas would be difficult to use not only in-universe, but narratively. It doesn’t fulfill the narrative role magic usually has, and humanity actually using it effectively would likely require more science and magitech to trick the magic into doing what we want it to, than pure wand-waving and magic words. (It’s not like humanity would give up.)

Magic like this would need to be Sufficiently Analyzed to even be properly useful – just like electricity, radio waves and other phenomena we’ve taken thorough advantage of in real life.