The Lovecraftian branch of fantasy’s evolutionary tree seems to be an exception to this rule—it actually makes much of how unintuitive its magical rules are to human minds, often to the point of creating madness or other nastiness in most sorcerers. Of course, a corollary of this is that it’s much less effective as wish-fulfillment, even if some partial exceptions exist—the appeal lies in the worldbuilding and sense of awe and horror.
(Charles Stross’s Lovecraftian technomage Bob Howard does some cool things in a magical system that’s essentially an extension of higher math, for example—but they’d probably be much less cool to readers without a well-developed compatibility mode.)
The Lovecraftian branch of fantasy’s evolutionary tree seems to be an exception to this rule—it actually makes much of how unintuitive its magical rules are to human minds, often to the point of creating madness or other nastiness in most sorcerers. Of course, a corollary of this is that it’s much less effective as wish-fulfillment, even if some partial exceptions exist—the appeal lies in the worldbuilding and sense of awe and horror.
(Charles Stross’s Lovecraftian technomage Bob Howard does some cool things in a magical system that’s essentially an extension of higher math, for example—but they’d probably be much less cool to readers without a well-developed compatibility mode.)