I wasn’t expecting to have a philosophical nightmare thanks to Disney Lorcana. It’s a colourful card game where I can make Tigger and Cinderella fight, and maybe find a fun card of Stitch dressed up as Elvis Presley. There shouldn’t be any room for pondering the status of life or how murky the classifications between the animate and inanimate can be, and yet here we are.
Now that we’ve seen the entire of Lorcana’s The First Chapter, one card stands out as not just keeping me up at night, but also raises serious questions about how the game will tackle elements of the Disney canon in the future. The Magic Mirror not being a character freaks me out.
In Lorcana, there are three card types: characters, which are the sentient beings of Disney; items, the gadgets, bits and bobs they use; and actions, which can be events, magic, or songs. So far, all three have been pretty discrete, until you look a little closer at one, unassuming amethyst item.
Magic Mirror is an item card that costs two ink, and then, by paying four ink and being exerted, lets you draw a card. It’s not a great card – it can’t be inked, and its ability is expensive – but it isn’t the stinkiest of stinkers, either.
That isn’t the point, though. I’m not sitting in a pool of cold sweat at night thinking about inefficient card draw. I’m thinking about this thing’s card type. Why is it an item?
In Snow White, the Mirror is clearly depicted as being a summoned entity, complete with the fires of Hell accompanying its arrival. The Evil Queen even says “let me see thy face”, not “let me see any face, the UX design on this mirror is terrible”. While it’s bound only to tell the truth, it has a personality – it can be snide, rude, and aggressive. It’s a victim of the Queen just as much as Snow White.
There is a possible argument that the card is referring to the mirror itself, rather than the spirit it contains, however the ability is playing up the spirit’s ability to reveal the truth by letting you put cards into your hand. A pane of glass can’t do that, only the magical, possibly-demonic face floating in it can.
It’s not as if this couldn’t have worked if the Magic Mirror was a character and not an item. Plenty of characters have abilities that require you to pay a cost, and with how much Magic Mirror’s costs, it wouldn’t even be too big of a balance issue to let him quest and challenge as well. This leaves one, horrifying conclusion: Ravensburger, or Disney, don’t see the Mirror as a being. He is a function, an object, bound to serve you.
The character with a face, personality, and his own motivations is an item, and yet the Wardrobe from Beauty and the Beast, and the magically animated, but otherwise insentient, brooms get the honour of being considered characters. If we compare the brooms and the Mirror, the line appears to be whether something can move on its own volition. But then, if we do ever get cards based on the Brave Little Toaster, would the Air Conditioning Unit, who famously resented being stuck in a wall, be considered an item compared to the more mobile toaster? Why is locomotion the mark of what makes someone count as a person?
If the Mirror is an item card, what would a hypothetical Pinocchio be? What about any character from Toy Story? Wall-E? The Gargoyles? Disney is full of characters who fall into the same not-quite-biological space as the Magic Mirror; can we expect to see all of them lumped in as items instead? How key to a story do you have to be before you’re granted characterhood and are elevated from a mere item?
Magic: The Gathering has already solved this problem by allowing cards to use multiple types. The closest comparison to items and characters Magic has is its Artifact Creatures, which represent everything from animated scarecrows to the Gingerbread Man. Maybe in the future we’ll see Item Characters hit Lorcana to help cross the divide between the inorganic and the very much alive.
But, at least for now, the Mirror is a victim of just another in a long list of cruel injustices in his life.