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This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.
That's why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.
β¦and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like "one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it"
And don't worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it's supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling's unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to "whos- who's telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup."
People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it's so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn't because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that's the whole point.
I actually used to be on My university's quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it's called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don't get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.
The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards
Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?
As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.
Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose "because he wanted to do it on his own terms"...!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it's still completely possible for them to win if he doesn't throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.
But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.
i mean, they're never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they're making.
like that andy weir interview where he says "there are no politics in my books". i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they're researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he's not written them that way. it's completely by accident, or so he believes.
I am once again begging everyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea instead
My mom taught high school English for decades and she used to tell her students that JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but a terrible author. She dreamed up a really cool world that really resonated with people, but her execution in that world is awful. The biggest place you see this is to lift the curtain on anything, and it crumbles instantly. Time Turners? Unnecessary plot device with massive implications. American wand? Kills Voldemort immediately. Sex ed at Hogwarts? No sex, only snog?
JK Rowling hasn't helped herself with this either, by continuously editorializing. Hermione was always black. Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler. Wizards didn't need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book. When she was starting out, she didn't have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn't need one. It shows. She shat gold once, and in her eyes, it's now gold every time.
Avada Kedavra is dumb. Wizard duels essentially have to follow the be first, best, or cheat rule. The definite death spell makes being best pointless and cheating too slow. You have to go nuclear first and fastest. Also, the defining characteristic is the green flash and no marks on the dead body. In the world of Harry Potter, if nobody sees the flash, and nobody finds the murder wand, every heart attach and brain aneurysm is indistinguishable from the universes ultimate crime.
But, I think things like this are a reason why people love Harry Potter. It's why I did. When you're presented with a world so incredible with an execution that's lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over. I love reading cheap, bad, free-on-Kindle sci-fi and fantasy, because oftentimes the central idea can be really unique, cool, and interesting. The execution can be awful, or sometimes not, but the core idea is usually a diamond. I get to be an archeologist, uncover it, and re-imagine it as I see fit. That's why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive. It resonated so strongly because people had to invest their own imaginations so deeply to make sense of a story that fundamentally doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
I love that it's finally culturally acceptable to say "Actually no, the books weren't better. They sucked" lol
What Alfonso CuarΓ³n managed to achieve with Prisoner of Azkaban on screen however still gives me goosebumps... plotholes be damned lol
Same sort of problem with Quidditch. Whichever team gets the golden snitch automatically wins, so the whole game would realistically just be everyone trying to get it and ignoring everything else. JK is very bad at designing world rules. Maybe that's why she's so bad at comprehending reality as well.
I hate myself for remembering, and am likely wrong, but isn't the snitch worth 150 points and ends the game? So if the opposing team was 151 points ahead catching the snitch would lose the match? I'm not going to look it up, I don't care enough about being right in regards to Harry Potter and I'm not even sure why I commented outside of my inate need for information to be correct...
Not using Avada Kadavra in a wizard duel in which you intend to kill the other is like having a duel with guns with infinite ammunition and attempting to bludgeon the enemy with the hilt or stab them with a bayonet instead without ever taking a shot.
There is a reason that every real fight Harry was in was just Avada Kadavra vs Expelliarmus. If you can just kill with an unbeatable curse and are willing to, you just kill. If you aren't willing to kill, your best recourse is removing their weapon before they kill you. It may be boring, but literally any other moves in a typical duel would be the sub-optimal at minimum, suicidal at worst.
Which is why it's bad writing.
"Unblockable killing spell" is the kind of thing that pops up on a middle school playground because every kid wants to have the trump card in make-believe and the last kid just cast Meteor.
Eragon is a contemporary-ish book and has killing magic that can kill normies by the dozens/hundreds, but other magic users have to do more than play rock-paper-nuclear-option.
Yeah, it's a common problem with soft magic systems in general. Eragon's harder magic system at least defined clear(ish) boundaries, even if those boundaries were kind of a retcon after the ending battle of the first book. I definitely enjoyed the mechanics of the harder system better.
I like to subscribe to the "magic makes it's users imbeciles" fan theory. (Though the truth is that JK just isn't all that bright).
It isn't that the killing spell is unblockable. Harry and his mom managed to block it twice. But apparently magicians in HP universe are just completely dumb and unwilling or incapable of innovation. That was spelled out clearly in book 1 where an elementary logic puzzle was seen a good way to protect the greatest treasure on earth.
Ron's dad, for example, lived in England. He could wander the muggle streets freely if he wanted to. He had a deep fascination of basic muggle items, yet he didn't just go to his local library to check out a book or log on to the internet to learn about things that were his passion.
A good writer could do cool stuff with that. It doesn't even have to be laziness, but the lack of necessity for innovation.
A fun example is Project Hail Mary. The alien species in it is highly intelligent and has invented space travel, but has no computer technology. It's not that they lack the capacity and ingenuity required to develop computers, but because the structure of their brains that developed for extremely advanced audio processing in an environment without light made them extremely good at mathematics. They never had a need to invent calculators, so they never progressed down the technological path that would eventually lead to computers.
I thought like, canonically, avada kedavra fucks up your soul or whatever everytime you use it and it slowly corrupts you or something
So it has a downside.
Also, to work, you have to be able to mean it and basically be a psychopath for it to even work right.
Isn't there explanations for why people dont just use it willy nilly?
its also easily traceable and under dementor death penalty or something
I thought like, canonically, avada kedavra fucks up your soul or whatever everytime you use it and it slowly corrupts you or something
Are you referring to how Voldemort split his soul to create the Horcruxes? The books only specify that a murder is needed to split the soul, not that the murder needs to be done using the killing curse
Joanne Rowling, folks.
Don't use her preferred name when she's an utter cunt destroying that right for others.
You mean Joanne Kunt Rowling?
She did write/say that there was no defense versus the killing curse did she not? (Except being Harry P that is)
No defense against "Power Word Kill" either but wizards in every other setting are renowned for coming up with magical rube goldberg machines to kill, just like a guy.
That's why Dumbledore kicked Voldemorts ass by flinging a statue infront of him, them doing a bunch of fancy shit, encasing him in ice. Since it's easier to hit than with an Avra Kedavra. Not that it matters until the author is no longer alive...
Why did they just both insta-die? Shouldn't the green energy shit have collided and made a nice spectacle like they did in the movie? π€
The spectacle in the movie and book was explained in the book. That only happened because Harry and Voldy were basically the same person as far as the magic was concerned. When Voldy killed Harry's mom, he inadvertently made Harry his horcrux by trying, and failing to kill Harry. So basically one person was trying to kill themselves, and that caused the backfire. Also Harry didn't cast Avada Kedavera in that duel. He cast his signature spell, Expelliarmus.
Basically there was some "chosen one," stuff going on there. With anyone else, if both wizards get the spell off, both would be dead.
ETA: technically Harry failed to kill Bellatrix the only time he attempted Avada Kedavera. She got hit by a green blast and laughed at him telling him, "you have to mean it Potter, you can't just say it!"
