The story takes place in Britain and the vast majority of the characters barely, if at all, know what Football(aka Soccer) is. Mr. Weasley the muggle “expert” doesn’t know what a rubber duck is for. They’re not gonna know shit about some American muggle sport.
The fact that the wizarding world is able to be this aloof about 99% of the population they live amongst is incredible. In a real world that would be due to a tireless cadre of extremely knowledgable and capable wizards working to keep them separate. Unfortunately the fact that some hack like Voldie could make such a mess of things so easily kinda disproves that. Therefore the wizarding world is the luckiest bunch of idiots ever.
The story takes place in Britain. What the fuck even is a chicago bull?!
Or they see themselves as a superpower that is above needing to learn about others, perhaps?
(I didn’t read the books so if this is obviously wrong I’m sorry)
No that’s pretty much it, there’s even a subplot where Muggle Studies is an elective at Hogwarts, but only Hermonie wants to take it… and it’s solely so she can dunk on Wizards not knowing shit about Muggles while getting an Easy A
This is why I only liked the earlier Harry Potter books, the setting is clearly just not built to be taken seriously… so Goblet of Fire and onward demanding as such just fails.
You hit the nail on the head. It’s sort of like Doctor Who in the sense that it asks of you, “don’t look at any of this stuff too closely, just enjoy the ride.” Unfortunately for Harry Potter the structure of the story eventually required a bit more seriousness and the world can’t provide it very well.
Which is why I think the movies are better than the books.
Yeah. The series loses a lot when whimsy isn’t the driving theme.
You should read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I don’t want to spoil anything but it is so good. Honestly, book stores should stop selling the official Harry Potter books and just stock HPMOR.
If you like HPMOR and you’re a D&D player, you should read Harry Potter and the Natural 20.
I actually did forever ago. It was pretty good. Harry is too smart and way too smug for me but I did really like voldie’s plan and how they dealt with him. I wonder if that would work in the actual books. It kinda seems like it from book 2.
To be fair, I think most people would be insufferably smug if they could blow everyone’s minds with some basic physics and creative thinking.
Muggle: this is a standard Blu-ray optical disc. It is capable of storing up to 100gb of information, which [according to Google] roughly translates into one or more movies (depending on the video quality), 28,000 songs, 30,000 photos, or 67.8 million pages of text.
Wizard: all of that in this tiny disc!? What is this? Magic?
Muggle: nah bitch, that’s physics.
Wizard: gasp physics! What a strange name for muggle-magic.
Second the recommendation for HPMOR. It does so much more service to the Wizarding World setting than JK Rowling ever did. It is outright one of my favorite pieces of literature just on its own merits.
The Statute of Secrecy people might’ve been tasked to investigate one “Magic Johnson.”
It’s…it’s a joke
I’m aware.
An extremely american centric joke
And the Chicago Bulls are a basketball team… so there’s no chance they’d know what that is, despite Quidditch being essentially soccer + basketball…
Yup.
The Bulls aren’t a Quidditch team.
Side note, i really hate the whole soccer/football thing. It’s so confusing because sometimes people accommodate me and mean American football but just say football. But then I have to ask what they mean anyway because not everyone accommodates me that way (and why should they?). It’s just so many extra steps.
Did you see that ludicrous display last night‽
Being that it was set in England no, they wouldn’t have.
Michael Jordan in the 90s was a worldwide phenomenon. I can totally believe it if they mentioned him. I’m from India originally and even we knew who he was in the 90s.
Yeah, people don’t really get the fame he had. Michael Jordan is the reason Gatorade is a big brand. He’s the main reason people wear athlete branded shoes and gear.
People below are proving your point. “I just know that he played basketball.” This dude has been retired for 2 decades and people who don’t care about basketball still know who he is. That’s huge.
Yeah exactly. He MADE Nike and Gatorade and athletic clothing popular. Dude made the NBA and basketball a globally popular market. He was way more than just an athlete.
Gatorade is such a big brand, I have never seen it once in any of the Belgian stores.
Maybe you guys would win at basketball more if you had it? Be like Mike.
i know he is a basketball person. thats about it
Yea and I only know that thanks to Spacejam.
Yeah but you do know of him.
Space Jam is also how I first heard of R Kelly. Haven’t heard anything about him for a while, wonder how his career is going.
Believe it or not, jail.
I grew up in the 90s in England, and we didn’t give a toss about basketball. Still don’t.
Michael Jordan was the guy in Space Jam with the expensive trainers that a couple of spoiled kids had. We were aware of his existence, but that was it.
Michael Jordan is the guy who makes shoes
That’s the guy from space jam isn’t it?
Should have said Manchester United then….
The “design” of Quidditch is proof Rowling didn’t know anything about sports.
It’s proof she’s a horrible writer, she wants a scene to make Harry look good in front of his classmates… So she invents a sport that conveniently has a role where the focus can be on one person and that one thing this one person does is just magically more important than anything anyone else does… It creates two things, Harry’s image as a Gary Stu and the world’s most pointless fucking sport.
lmao instawin snitch
It’s not instawin, you can catch it and still lose
Can you though? Like the rules as presented in the books are just:
Snitch caught > get 1000pts > game ends
The only other way to get points is in intervals of what? 10? 25 maybe? Let’s assume it’s 25 because I can’t remember. That means you need to be up 40 fucking goals in order to tie if the other team gets the snitch. And that’s assuming your entire team doesn’t die from exhaustion seeing as the game doesn’t end until the snitch is caught lol
I don’t know why I remember that, but i think catching snitch was 150 points
It’s definitely not 1000 because in one of the books a character catches it but the team still loose
100% she wrote that part in just because people kept asking “well, doesn’t the team that catches it always win?” That is also why Neville knocks over a cupboard to destroy all time-travelling devices. I think she is either SUPER insecure or just not a very good writer.
Catching the snitch gets you 150 points, scoring with the quaffle gets you ten points. So you have to score 15 times to match one snitch catch. And the game doesn’t end until the snitch is caught.
Fun fact, in one of the pro quidditch matches in the fourth book, the snitch-catching-team actually loses the match. They built their team around their seeker, and basically just banked on him immediately locating and catching the snitch every game, which backfires in the final match of the Quidditch World Cup or whatever, when the opposing team had really good chasers that ran up the score really fast just by scoring with the quaffle.
mf show me one game where that happens
I thought Quidditch was her attempt at satirizing how arbitrary she thought real-world sports are, but maybe that’s giving her too much credit
Giving her too much credit.
Yeah, yeah, sports, cell phones, computers, etc. But I still cannot believe that none of the muggleborns brought a damn ballpoint pen to Hogwarts. It would blow the mind of those crazy wizards still using quills. “Weasley Wizard’s Wheezes proudly presents the new quill that writes without an inkwell!”
The wizarding world seems really conservative. They might know of them but just scoff at such modern ridiculousness.
Harry Potter is based in Britain, so it’s an absolute travesty that no one is singing Three Lions, or talking about the absolute dicking that Gazza gave the Scots.
Also no mention of Bucky. It’s almost as if they’re not really in Scotland, and that it’s all fictional.
brits don’t care about nba
A truly amazing sight: an average Twitter resident discovers that countries outside of the US exist
A truly amazing sight: An average Lemmy user discovers that they can’t tell when someone on Twitter is making an obvious joke
Its just a bad joke since HP is not set in america so the joke doesnt even make sense
That’s what makes it funnier, at least to me. 🤷♀️
I think that’s part of the joke
The joke would only hit with Americans because of it.
It’s two jokes. The one abut not knowing about current events of the time and the one about making the first joke in a silly way. Could’ve made it clearer with using a sillier example.
Or they’re just oblivious. But I think it was intentional.
I guess an average Lemmy user can’t tell when someone on Lemmy is making an obvious joke either
Too many of them are not joking though
Man, the Chudley Cannons are terrible this decade.
It’s a bunch of nerds and magic geeks. They would think about sports about as much as I did in the 90s, and if anyone asked me whether the Chicago Bulls had an epic run I’d say uh… what? I don’t know.
This comment is giving me Mr. Enter vibes, for those who don’t know, he’s a Youtuber infamous for claiming “Turning Red” sucks because it didn’t randomly drop the Red Panda premise in order to focus on the (Literally not American…) characters reacting to 9/11.
Was the way Mr. Enter framed the video a joke?
Because this is a joke.
Unfortunately no, he was completely serious, though people did meme on his take a lot. - https://youtu.be/BhRD2lgNSJE
*cereal
We explaining the joke then?
