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Every fantasy work has two characters: magic and the landscape.
In Earthsea, the water compartmentalizes the locations. Here, Ged grew up. There, he learnt about magic. And every time we want to know more about this land, water provides punctuation to the story and isolates the area.
Middle Earth has a very different personality. The wide land demands horses, or a lot of walking. Tolkien goes into depth in every chapter of every book, uncovering new aspects of this or that part of the land; here we find gnarled trees, there mountains, later will be a rocky landscape.
The book reveals the landscape's character little-by-little, just like any member of the nine.
This persistent character typically demands a map - the sure sign of a fantasy book, so we can understand the landscape as it's revealed along a journey.
Within the Last Unicorn, magic has a plan. Powerful wizards can control it, but weaker wizards like Schmendrick will sometimes shout 'magic, do as you will!', and the magic itself decides how to resolve the situation.
Earthsea's magic gives us rare depth. Everything in the world has a name, which references the thing absolutely. Parents find out their child's name, rather than giving it. Every grain of sand has a name, and to change the name, is to change the thing.
Dungeons & Dragons famously gives us Vancian magic, where mages memorize spells, which leave their head upon casting, forcing them to memorize the spells again.
Where the Last Unicorn shows magic character which cares about affairs, Earthsea shows us something which fiercely designates and recognizes the world, without imparting desires.
Where D&D tells us enough about magic to really understand it, Earthsea paints a mysterious picture; the more we know about this magic, the more we want to complete the puzzle.
All this thinking really exists to justify my eternal condemnation of Harry Potter. I've always liked fantasy, and it came out at just the right time for me to enjoy it. But I never did.
Firstly, the book has no map - a rookie mistake! The story does not revolve a round a journey, and the landscape of Hogwarts doesn't reveal much character.
Magic seems to work by saying things in Latin, which suggests some real problems for magic-users back in the Roman times. Every time they mentioned a sandwich, some food would magically appear. Or perhaps it wouldn't - the books indicate you can summon food, but then again that you can't.
Both characters appear shallow, and feint. Magic is a slave to the plot, rather than directing the plot. The landscape never interacts with the characters.