My spouse has been relistening to the books on tape recently and so I have been hearing it by proxy.
The narrators really put in the work to make some flimsy writing seem engaging. Like in one of the later books there’s this significant scene where some evil magic makes an evil visage of Hermione. In the subsequent chronological scene the real Hermione is super angry at Ron and not once does the writing reference or make a connection with any of the imagery between the two.
This is actually addressed in the books. There’s a part when Harry is whining how nobody believed him when he said Voldemort was back and Hermione basically goes “Dude, you convinced Cedric to touch the cup at the same time you did, then you both disappeared and you came back with his dead body screaming about an evil wizard who has been dead for more than a decade. I only believed you because I’m your friend.”
It’s a huge plot point in the fifth book/film as well. Lots of people including the ministry don’t want to believe him.
Yeah but the movies specifically frame it more as “the ministry has been infiltrated” and less as “Harry, your story is shady af”
The movies also frames Dumbledore as a hard boiled unhinged detective who slams people against walls and shakes them down for information, whereas the book totally missed out on that great aspect of his personality. Swings and roundabouts
Definitely, Dumbledore is much better in the movies. I think the books overexplore his relationship with Voldemort and he comes off a bit daft. All of his interactions with Voldemort are like:
Voldemort: Genocide is cool, right?
Dumbledore: No, it isn’t
V: You’re right. Anyway, theoretically, how can I become more stronger?
D: Are you gonna do a genocide?
V: high pitched Whaaaaat…?! Naaaaaaaah! I would never do that!
D: Ok, here’s how you become more powerful…
Dumbledore is much better in the movies
This is a hot take I’ve never heard before
Probably an unpopular opinion, but the stories don’t hold up under scrutiny, and that’s apparent even from the first book. Then again, that’s not how one enjoys children’s books.
She can tell a decent story. But she’s awful at world building beyond the “what would be cool to have” step and the moment she has to consider the ramifications of things she introduced coming up again. Like she can tell a story just fine, but the moment she needs to care about continuity it all goes out the window.
Probably an unpopular opinion
Not really. Even big potter fans acknowledge that the books have giant plotholes
Huge potter fan here (that won’t consume any potter media because JKR is a self-owning ass clown that deserves to watch her empire crumble), and yeah, even well before the Twitter nonsense she started spouting, it wasn’t like a secret or anything that the books weren’t perfect. I still stood on like at midnight for prisoner of Azkaban as a kid, though. But I remember thinking the Voldemort/death eaters thing was a pretty clear WWII/Hitler/Nazi analogy and googling it only to find an interview with her stating it absolutely was not, and people who thought it was were “reading politics” into a children’s story. She’s always been a dumbass, and she’s wrong about her own work. Also, the whole house elf thing was… Really, really rough to read as a kid. I could never understand why no one was on Hermione’s side, and how no one could see that elves didn’t want to be free because their condition would be that of an outcast, and in a world where only wizard’s were allowed wands, nonhuman humanoids were veru clearly subjugated to the point of delusionality.
Which is to say, yeah, the books got problems, even if you love em. I love those books, because the world felt real, even when it was shitty, it felt real. But there are major problems in them, both in the plothole sense, and in the politics (or lack thereof) of the author shining through the cracks
Nobody is on the side of the house elves because Hermione is the pet leftist. Ever watch Downton Abbey? Pretty good show tbh, but if you have, then Tom Felton is the Downton Abbey Hermione. Why is Downton Abbey, of all things, relevant? Because it’s conservative apologia for the way things were, just as HP is conservative apologia; these types of media will often include a zany leftist that they can soften and win over to show how their conservative agenda is good actually. Think about it, HP isn’t left vs right, it’s old conservatism (Dumbledore and his muggle-loving ways) vs batshit insane ultra conservatism (the Death Eaters). If you swap wizarding blood for noble blood, being a wizard for being a noble, etc. it works almost perfectly. Hermione is new nobility that the old nobility doesn’t respect; Harry is from a good pedigree, but was raised by his peasant aunt and uncle and doesn’t know how to act the part, etc etc. The left (Hermione) wasn’t supposed to win (and didn’t), that W was meant for the old conservatives all along.
HP and Rowling have always been conservative, it was just that we misread the struggle being portrayed there.
I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.
It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.
It just doesn’t seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that’s rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.
This is a great counterpoint, thanks for taking the time to write this thoughtful response. Imo, Downton paints a rosy picture of the gentry, one of kind, intelligent people who are willing to change with the times if only they understood the need; one where there’s a healthy mutualism between the gentry and those under them (house servants, tenants, etc). Maybe that really is how it was, idk, I’m American and all of our gentry equivalent seem to feel little responsibility to those upon whom they depend.
That’s fair. The rosiness I always attributed to the fact it’s basically a fancy soap opera with a huge budget.
The Crowleys are definitely depicted as kind lords, though the show contrasts them several times with other less humane counterparts. I don’t have the education to rate its historical accuracy, however.
She’s a classic neolib. Pretending to be progressive while actually pushing regressive, conservative bullshit.
This makes too much sense
I searched for her denying the Nazi analogy and only found the opposite
Q: Many of us older readers have noticed over the years similarities between the Death Eaters tactics and the Nazis from the 30s and 40s. Did you use that historical era as a model for Voldemort’s reign and what were the lessons that you hope to impart to the next generation?
It was conscious. I think that if you’re, I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime we would think Nazi Germany. There were parallels in the ideology. I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So yeah that follows a parallel. It wasn’t really exclusively that. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it’s taken over, there are parallels to regimes we all know and love. [Laughter and applause.] So you ask what lessons, I suppose. The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think ti’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books, but I think that’s it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.
Will check the link a little later (just woke up to pee. Lol). But this was years ago, like around the time PoA came out, or maybe halfbood prince? Either way, it was ab article, not s video. I’ll try to find it later today
It’s a transcript from a Q&A session she did in 2007, around the time of the last book and the OotP film, so a few years after PoA (book and film).
Edit: And here’s an interview with a dutch newspaper from 2007 where she says Voldemort is kind of a Hitler https://archive.is/Pi45t (warning, it’s in Dutch)
Maybe I’m misremembering, but I promise I didn’t just make that up! I can’t find the article I saw when I was young, but it was, like, openly hostile to the idea of it. Maybe it was someone else and I attributed it to her or something. :/
I’m not saying that she didn’t say it, she said a lot of stuff over the years. I assume she changed her mind, given you said it was around the time of PoA. If I’m not mistaken she had quite some influence on the films and in the last two films you literally see people running around in what look like Nazi uniforms.
Also, the whole house elf thing was… Really, really rough to read as a kid. I could never understand why no one was on Hermione’s side, and how no one could see that elves didn’t want to be free because their condition would be that of an outcast, and in a world where only wizard’s were allowed wands, nonhuman humanoids were veru clearly subjugated to the point of delusionality.
The motivation behind the idea was a good one, the execution of the idea was absolute cringe.
Let me explain. The intention was to highlight that the wizarding world has its own logic, and trying to apply the morality and philosophy of the mundane will end in failure, but Hermonie can’t see that being too smart for her own good in this area…
Unfortunately JK picked FUCKING SLAVERY as the way to make this point, because she is a dumbass. No, that’s underselling it: She’s a fascist who only had Voldemort be evil because the book needed a villain. JK Rowling legitimately believes that some groups of people are perpetually below “The normals”
Like take the concept of Royalty (Some people are better than others because they are of Noble Blood) and turn it onto its head, that there are people who are lesser than others because they are of dirty blood. (To JK these include the Irish, transgender people, and anyone who isn’t white)
“Mudblood” being a slur in the HP Universe is just JK’s way of projecting her worldview onto perceived enemies.
Oh and one last thing. JK did the “Wizard morality is different because it’s wacky and whimsical” a second time, in the Fantastic Beasts movies, where the worst crime in Wizard History was… drumroll Trying to stop the Nazis from coming into power… (You see why Harry Potter just doesn’t work with serious stories?: JK herself is impossible to take seriously, and infact is outright dangerous because there are those who attempt to do just that.)
JK hates the Irish? I don’t keep up with her or Harry Potter much, but I know about her twitter meltdowns about trans people – didn’t know she had a whole thing about Irish people tho lol. She’s such a nutjob 😂
Harry Potter has a character called Seamus Finnigan, his whole thing is to act like he’s drunk and blow things up. (It’s a stereotype in England that Irish people make cars into bombs and are literally domestic terrorists)
And if you look into the extended lore, well ya know how Hogwarts bizarrely has a house intended for Dark Wizards (Why is that a thing? I don’t remember “Serial Killing” being a major in Community College) named for the most second evil wizard in history (The first was Grindelwald who… wanted to stop the Nazis), Salazaar Slytherin.
If you look into the backstory of Salazaar Slytherin, he doesn’t really have any evil deeds to his name, he’s just Irish lol.
Also JK Rowling’s house elves are based on “Brownies”, stories Slave Owners would tell their children about how black people were “Really magic faeries who like working” and will “Disappear forever if you give them nice things”
Basically lying to children so they don’t realize their parents are “the baddies”
She’s a disgusting person.
I wanna give a shout out to Kingsley Shacklebolt (First name is King, as in Dr. Martin Luther KING Jr., last name is literally a tool from the 1800’s used to keep slaves from jumping off of slave ships), who’s contribution to the series is being black, trying to arrest Dumbledore on false charges, and here’s my favorite being afraid of Voldemort’s quest to kill off the Mudbloods because he… Doesn’t know who his father is and thus cannot verify that he isn’t muggleborn…
Jesus fucking Christ JK, this is almost as bad as when you assumed Alohamora meant “Friendly to thieves” because it’s from an African Language (It actually just refers to the color red)
It’s not even a plot hole here (though there are a million plot holes in the books). They literally use the truth serum on Barty Crouch Jr and he fesses up.
Yeah, plus iirc after this pretty much everyone except his friends and senior Hogwarts staff is deeply suspicious of Harry and no one wants to believe Voldemort is back. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots wrong with the series, but I can’t say this is one of them.
Yup, and in the same book too.
I only like the first three Harry Potter books, when Scabbers goes, so does the book having any credibility it seems.
People don’t like Harry Potter for the story, so when it tries too be serious it falls apart. The part of Harry Potter people enjoy is the whimsy of the wizarding world, that’s it.
For me it’s always the unexplained power nerfing that authors do just to advance the plot.
Harry Potter in the first 3 books was fearless, he literally took on voldemort with his bare hands.
Then when the dumbass plan with the port key cup happens, he just stands there like an idiot as the rat dude kills Cedric and revives Voldemort as if both he and Cedric don’t have wands that allow them to cast spells.
I mean they could have maybe had like 20 wizards camping the graveyard to make escaping impossible, but nah they really tried to make the coward rat guy seem like he was now somehow more capable than all of voldemort’s previously defeated plans combined.
Flashes back to Tails being scared of Chaos Zero despite having defeated Chaos 4 before
You don’t speak for all people. No doubt what you said is true for some. My favorite books were 4 and 5.
Book 4 is great, but honestly, what is there to like about book 5? Nothing fucking happens in the entire thing. In my opinion it has always been the absolute worst of the series.
I bailed on the series halfway through book 5. That was a slog.
100% agree. It’s just a huge slog of everything being terrible for Harry for the whole book. Absolutely the worst in the series.
6 and 7 for me. It got dark in a good way
Half blood prince was my favorite
same
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
To cover up magic on all “fronts” would be impossible by today’s standards. Harry Potter would never be as successful nower days as it was. Simply because the smartphone enters the life’s of humans as essential device very early in life.
Kind of hard to switch off all those thoughts.
Disagree. My kids love Harry Potter.
Nowadays* one word.
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
Unless it does so unpredictably / always exactly the way you don’t want it to. It’s magic after all.
If some wizards of quantum mechanics can write math for… whatever quantum mechanics is… I think there could be a way or two, to manipulate magic by science.
Easiest explanation is: there is no electricity in hogwarts and wizards don’t have electricians nor electricity generation, so “electricity doesn’t work in hogwarts”.
If magic was electromagnetic or at least can be measured by effects that it has wizards would have been found during 20th century by general populace.
The easiest explanation is that it’s magic and we’re all muggles and therefore incapable of understanding it.
Something, something, magi-chlorians
There is nothing in the books that says that people without magic can’t understand it? I think there was a plot point in 4 or 5 book where harry is on trial for using some spell to scare away dementors, and his neighboor testifies that he really did it and people don’t believe her cause she doesn’t have magic. But that’s only seeing magical creatures, what stops anyone from understanding it exactly? They do repeatable things that return repeatable results, pretty understandable.
the neighbor is a squib, not a muggle
What’s the difference? There is no half magical state, you either can do magic or can’t.
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic. So that is a new physical law in disguise. An especially interesting one that interacts with certain intelligence (like mind reading of the user, by the user of other users, memory extraction and manifestation in sentient beings).
Sentient Electromagimagnetic field confirmed?
Or that can be a bullshit by uninformed wizards with superiority complex, they have like 5 years of mandatory education. And most don’t interact with anyone but magical people in their enclaves.
And are getting mamed and inbred out of tradition in a school designed to teach them survival skills in a world the muggles already made their own.
Significant Digits is an HPMOR sequel-fanfic that toys with these kinds of ideas.
Magic could operate differently from electromagnetism, but still interfere, such as with quantum effects. Inference doesn’t need to go both ways.
I thought about writing a magic setting with fairly hard justification for magic, and in my world, you’d control individual atoms and combine them to get the effects you want. You’d do this by gaining the respect of or instilling fear into atoms so they’d do your bidding. Spoken spells are more like tricks taught to dogs than having any power of their own, and the power derives from the respect or fear the atoms have for the caster. This explains why some wizards/witches are more powerful than others, and why learning isn’t necessarily the best way to get more powerful. The strongest magic users in my world spend a lot of time meditating, meaning communing with the target group of atoms.
The inner workings of atoms is poorly understood, so I think there’s room to insert some form of sentience.
Getting your magical SI units right could help you balance the powers. I like the idea of “Respecto Atomum”
How much respect is needed for no more movement at all (0°K) in 1m^3?
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic.
I don’t think there’s actually any such mention. There’s several mentions about how “muggle technology doesn’t work in the Hogwarts grounds”, but there’s no mention of electronics going haywire when someone is doing magic outside of hogwarts, imo?
Please do correct me if I just remember wrong.
And even just turning out lights is something that is apparently not that simple to do. Aside from Peruvian instant darkness powder — which doesn’t exactly snuff out lights, but covers them in darkness — the only thing to affect lights is Dumbledore’s deluminator. And he’s a magical genius.
My point being even turning off the lights is challenging. Muggle tech may not work in Hogwarts but I don’t recall any mention of magic fucking up tech unless it’s magic specifically meant to fuck up tech. Hogwarts is just like such a protracted and magical place that “muggle tech doesn’t work” but even that’s kind of a silly overarching statement that’s easy to challenge. Plumbing is technically muggle tech. It works. Wouldn’t ball point pens work as well? I imagine those would be pretty highly valued commodities. I think muggle borns could easily flog biros for at least a galleon a piece. Which the muggleborn could then go and exchange for the value of the gold, getting probably hundreds of pound for a galleon.
Endless money glitch.
But yeah at least pens would work I’d argue. Something like calculators is easy to see being fucked by some ambient magic fields, but pens? Nah.
Afaik the camera used in the first movie is analogue… Holy Shit, I have to read this before I can answer.
Oh youre going by quotes from movies yeah I don’t remember those as well as the books but I think my argument stands and the first comments there seem to corroborate
Sounds like someone needs to read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”.
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated
…that would also be true if it didn’t interact with electricity.
That’s not given. Many magic systems are inherently unexplainable. Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow. A bunch of stories use a similar explanation (replace monotheistic god with primal forces/strands of fate/eldritch gods).
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study. Is there a correlation between particular prayers and miracles? Are particular mental states helpful? Do various traits make someone more or less likely to produce a miracle? Are there drugs that affect it? What are the limits to a miracle? Are there patterns in the time intervals between miracles? And so on, and so forth. A world with such a magic system, if you want it to be realistic, should have had an entire history of people studying these and many other things.
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study.
It might be technically studiable in the way you describe, but there’s no requirement for consistency of any kind. My statement was extra-universal, so you can’t assume that it’s discoverable intra-universally. If the result of your study is “this is behaving in completely inconsistent and random ways”, you have technically studied it, but you haven’t measured or analyzed it in any way.
You can just apply your approach to our universe. People have spent centuries attempting to measure and analyze miracles. Would you say that we have analyzed and studied the magic system by which the christian god works?
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
You’re still making assumptions about the magic system. Take for example the Solphons from “The Dark Forest” - super-smart subatomic machines that change the laws of physics to prevent advances in fundamental physics. Now imagine that they weren’t designed by an alien race, but instead by an extra-universal god, and there was no way to ever arrive at this knowledge (since no instruments for measuring etc. can ever be developed).
Suddenly you have a magic system that is fundamentally unstudiable, no matter the amount of humans with “common sense or intelligence”. No matter what idea you come up with to study the system, I’ll be able to come up with a way to make it fundamentally unstudiable. That’s what’s great about fiction - we’re not limited by the assumptions we have to make in real science.
HPMOR does a great job of making Harry Potter’s world rational and believable
It also Gary Stu’s the hell out of Harry, like even more so. The only thing I love about that book, and it’s spiritual sequal, is the fact that Hermione is, correctly, in Ravenclaw.
From a quick search, what I understand from your comment is that the book makes Harry flawless, is that right ?
Exactly. Basically a male “Mary Sue” character.
With Ayn Rand overtones
I don’t know this reference either, but will look it up. From the context though I think I understand the gist of it. Thanks
This is why we invented the Internet
I was sold at Efficient Market Hypothesis
I’m sorry I don’t understand
Asset prices reflect all the information that everyone knows about the asset. So wands are not efficiently priced because the wand chooses the owner, but robes are generally fungible so should be priced efficiently
Same with Fantastic Beasts, first one was just a whimsical adventure of Newt, second one tried to be serious and was a steaming pile of 💩
I only saw the first and it already made me wonder “How do they tell which animals are magical and should be hidden from the muggles?”, like how would muggles knowing about the blast-ended skrewts or that platipus-like think lead them to know about the wizarding world?
Eh, the first one also tried to have a serious subplot, and that subplot also sucked enough ass to make the climax of the film flop.
For an intelligent take on Harry Potter I can recommend https://hpmor.com/ I found it better than the original books.
I personally found HPMOR to be self aggrandising garbage that throws around scientific terms to try and be rationalist but uses them all wrong anyway.
Also the authors a cult leader. Somehow.
I thought that it used up all its good insights covering the first couple of books, and then limped to the ending.
Also the authors a cult leader. Somehow.
is he ?
Eh, read Diana Wynne Jones instead.
Just literally any books other than Harry Potter instead. Joanne had a generation locked in. Every form of media, spin-off, merch, a effing section of Universal Studios, etc. with unlimited money, and she could’ve just disappeared to do whatever she wanted to. Instead, she gets online and mouths off incessantly, alienating a good chunk of her base, and revealing what an awful human being she actually is. She could’ve been illegally racing panda bears in go-karts around her back yard and no one would ever have known. Just doing eccentric rich person stuff. It’s one of the biggest disappointments.
