In Islamic/pre-Islamic mythology (over simplifying greatly) genies are actually trapped demons forced into servitude long ago by human sorcerers. They must comply with your wish but use any ambiguity they can as a form of malicious compliance. It's also worth noting that the idea of genies granting 3 wishes is mostly a western invention and is also likely influenced by Christian ideas of "deals with the devil" (see Foust for how that usually works out for the wisher)
"Pre-Islamic"...
When are we going to have the balls to admit all the cultural appropriation and assimilation committed by the Abtahamic faiths?
Islam did to Arabic, Semetic and other middle eastern mysticisms, as the Catholic church did to European paganism.
A bit of genocide, with the motto of the round table. "Embrace, expand, extinguish".
Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.
I thought the 3 wishes came from the story of the Monkey's Paw
The monkey's paw comes from a short story of the same name by W.W. Jacobs back in 1902. It seems the genie that grants three wishes dates all the way back to 1697 in "The Ridicuolous Wishes" by Charles Perrault.
Isn't it also that originally captured genies had more superhuman abilities rather than unlimited power? As in they could perform a human could if they were not bound by physical limitations, but materializing stuff out of thin air is impossible for them.
Another thing I heard is that the entities that could actually do that had a witch-like deal to them, meaning that refusing a request from such a spirit most likely had some dire consequences for you.
"You shouldn't be fighting me, Perry the platypus. You should be fighting genies. Genies are the problem"
In Germany we have a word for it. Schadenfreude. translates to something like malicious joy. Basically the pleasure at someone else's misfortune.
In English we have a word too. It's called sadism.
Sadism usually enjoys inflicting the pain, whereas I understand schadenfreude as just enjoying it whether or not you were involved in causing it. Most times I've seen it used the person enjoying was not part of the cause.
An example would be maybe the Herman Cain awards subreddit. Anyone there was most likely doing the opposite of causing the problem, but were enjoying when people who did cause issues got comeuppance.
(For anyone not sure what that subreddit was, it was specifically showing when people who denied covid got sick and or died themselves. It wasn't for anyone who had Covid, just for people who they could also show vehemently and dangerously denied Covid and/or showed how they harassed others about it).
I suppose it depends on what lore you're using.
If you're using Wishmaster rules, it would be most efficient to just do what they want with no ironic twists and then get your freedom to reign terror unexpectedly after the 3rd wish.
If we're using Disney Alladin rules then the master must explicitly wish for the Genie's freedom or else it's trapped in the lamp forever. In this case it makes some sense to twist things as it would be the only kind of control you could exert.
In Quranic mythology, I think the jinn are mostly independent magical creatures that are purely neutral. In these cases, there are no real stakes for freedom at play, so every request would be played by ear.
Not everything is a trade. People do things because they like it, or out of any other emotion. It's capitalist philosophy that pretends everything is a trade and that you must earn something for anything you do.
Also talk about inefficient.
Why burn a 4th pevel spellslot for polymorph, when a simple jump spell would have done the job.
Genies can cast Wish as a cantrip, so they don't care about spell slots.
It always seemed like a logic gate thing to me, like the Fullmetal Alchemist rule of equivalent exchange. Otherwise, there comes a point where there would be no order or structure to the universe and the benefit is boiled down to simply preserving reality.
It could also be an interpretation thing. We often forget how riddled with context our natural language is.
But what about things that do not understand this context? For them, the request to "jump high" is not as easy. What distance is high? You could argue that athletes jump high, but in the eyes of the athlete they jump normal and they are expected to jump that high regularly, so that can't fit the bill for the wishgranter.
What about jumping to the stratosphere? We already get gimped by context, because you can't get a good context because jumping up there dwarfs in comparison to the humanly inconcievable distances such as jumping from one end of the universe to the opposite end. So using a distance is also a bust.
The last resort is reference. Frogs can be defined as "an animal that jumps high", so turning you into a frog is the safest bet to fulfill the wish without violating it through ambiguity, because you can't deny that you can see frogs as an animal that jumps high.
Maybe its like the Needful Things episode from Rick and Morty where its in the devil's nature to fuck with people foolish enough to trust him. Even Summer.
Check out the Wishmaster movies. The first two are quite enjoyable campy horror comedies, 3 and 4 not so much.
You wish for the genie to be free. Turns out to be the worse curse of all.
