Joanne Rowling, folks.
Don’t use her preferred name when she’s an utter cunt destroying that right for others.
Same goes for genocide Benjamin Netanyahu.
You mean Joanne Kunt Rowling?
Joanne Karen Rowling
I see HP fun or mockery. I upvote HP fun or mockery.
My first time hearing this in the movie I was like “did this mfer just say abrakedabra‽”
I mean…yeah. That’s kind of the whole reference…
No, the reference is despite having a huge pool of spells to chose from, they both used the same one.
and then theres the magic users that dont use words just ends up beating the ones that do, like faust vs zatanna.
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 know there’s been a fair bit of discussion and I only skimmed it, but the main issue I could see is if one team actually ignored everything for the snitch, it’s feasible the other team could get 15 goals literally for free before you actually succeed. But the video game nerfing the snitch tells you everything you need to know about whether it can be balanced at all.
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…
That’s correct - however, 150 points is a ridiculously high number that’s almost impossible to overcome. Every time the snitch was caught, that team won the game.
They won the game, but they may have lost the league if winning comes down to point differences.
This was a thing in the third book where Harry had to make sure they’re a certain number of points ahead before catching the snitch so that they’d not just win the match but also their school league.
You’re definitely right about it being a poorly-contrived scoring system, but there are a few games in the books where the team lost the game but grabbed the snitch. It’s always described as a “stem the bleeding” type decision
Edit: sorry, now seeing the replies to your other comments saying this, I guess you know by now 😅
It’s fifteen goals. While unlikely, it’s totally possible for a team to score fifteen goals more if the skill difference is high enough and the game is allowed to go for long enough.
There were some historic matches mentioned in one of the books, that apparently went on for weeks or even months, fifteen goals would be a really low number for that kind of match. The duration of a match only depends on how good the seekers are, a match can be over in five minutes which is really lame, or go on for ages which is also lame.
Is there any example of a real life sport where one play (that can only be done once per game) equals making 15 goals? That’s just bad rules.
Not a sport, but in mahjong, dealer yakuman are worth 35x a 1-han hand
Yea, I kind of remember this in book 4 where in the world cup Bulgaria (Viktor) caught the snitch, but the other team (I think Ireland) scored more points.
That’s why the Weasly twins were upset because they had placed that bet with Ludo Bagman who ran away with their money.
(Just to let you know, I enjoy HP as a kid but now, Fuck JK).
They won the bet, got the money… And the money was fake gold. (Leprechaun gold). It disappeared. So they were out the money. Not sure if gambling was legal or not, so I don’t think trying to report someone as stealing your gambling wins was feasible.
Anyways, yeah the only professional game in the books we saw was the exact scenario that people are complaining here would never happen. As in he caught the snitch to save themselves from complete embarrassment. A score of 370-10 or some shit looks a lot worse than just losing by a few points and putting off the inevitable
Ah, good call, I didn’t remember that! A really stupid rule regardless.
JK is very bad at designing world rules.
I mean, magic is inherently kinda jenky as a core concept. “The Magicians” series does a much better job of painting a magical boarding school and gets a bit meta-textual on the question of what the edges and limits of a magical world are expected to be.
I’ll happily spot you that Welters is a better wizard game than Quidditch. But it’s also more like Chess than Wizard Hockey, so it loses the narrative excitement in exchange for a more plodding and introspective exchange.
Shave down the Snitch aspect to, like, 20 points instead of 150 or whatever dumbshit Rowling originally ran with and it can create a few interesting edge cases for not catching the Snitch until the proper moment that can make the game more fun. Other than that hang up, its a very visually stunning and theme appropriate game for a bunch of kids on flying brooms to play.
Not necessarily. HP is just written with a soft magic system.
I quite like the Light Lightbringer series, which has a hard magic system.It’s so much more fun for me to read about creative ways of magic to be used when it’s based on physics of the world it’s in, when I could theorise about what’s possible and be amazed by the characters’ ingenuity.
Needs more explosions and an anti exploding kid spell, but otherwise a solid thumbs 45 degrees up.
I always found the whole snitch thing so stupid simply from a game rules perspective. Like most team sports have you work as a team to score points. Everyone participates and are more or less responsible for the outcome of the game. In quidditch you have that and then you have one team member that is just more special than everyone else, they can just control the outcome of the game by themselves. It goes against the whole concept of team sports.
Like most team sports have you work as a team to score points. Everyone participates and are more or less responsible for the outcome of the game.
A better writing of the game would have had other players working as a team to spot the Snitch. Or alternative strategies for leveraging the extra player in the early game, when finding the Snitch was unlikely. Or even just a history of the sport, or variations of amateur and professional rules, or a pro-league that got more than a casual mention for the first chapter of the fourth book and then never again.
you have that and then you have one team member that is just more special than everyone else
You could argue the pitcher in baseball or the QB in football fill a similar role.
But yes, the need to make Harry a Mary Sue at every opportunity definitely dragged on the series. The better parts of the series were when he wasn’t the center of attention and was more just an observer of a magical world.
I love the Magicians. Just finished a rewatch not too long ago. Their approach to magic is definitely much more entertaining than the HP universe. Especially the hilarious concept of “sphincter magic” that Penny tries to learn when his hands get messed up. That show did a great job with the meta humor.
My head canon is always converting magic into sci fi. The wizards are the descendants of a civilization that created the tech but they’re so far removed they don’t know anything about how it works, or about simple spells that would shortcut all the fancy shit. Doesn’t really explain the Snitch though, other than “they’re more about tradition than logic”.
My head canon is always converting magic into sci fi.
Arthur C. Clarke will be by to collect royalties.
Doesn’t really explain the Snitch though, other than “they’re more about tradition than logic”.
Lots of sports spring out of a bunch of silly children’s games that get increasingly bureaucratic to sell tickets.
Why not end the game with a timer or at a certain score count? Why introduce a fairy trapped in a golden ball who has some kind of personality, rather than just being a buzzing semi-invisible toy? Why not yadda yadda?
Rowling definitely left a lot on the table.
Same concept but kinda from the opposite direction, kinda like elder scrolls. Magic used to be super powerful and utterly broken but over time it’s degraded for one reason or another some things and groups still have access to the old magic but as a whole it’s pretty inaccessible. This is kinda how magic works in Elder Scrolls, the magic of the Dawn Era and Merithic Era were fucken broken world bending shit that did things like turning Solstheim into an island instead of a peninsula, but the world has since gained too much internal stability or perhaps instability to allow such things all that often, but scratching into that requires getting into Elder Scrolls meta physics which just no.
In The Goblet of Fire, Ireland beat Bulgaria despite Bulgaria getting the snitch. The problem with the snitch isn’t that the team that gets it automatically wins but that this particular match didn’t make sense because Bulgaria knew that getting the snitch would cause them to lose, so they would have instead focused on preventing Ireland from getting the snitch while they tried to get within 150 points.
Yeah, another comment pointed that out. And as you pointed out, it’s a stupid rule regardless!
I think a reasonable game could be played with those rules, given how quickly goals are scored and how hard it is supposed to be to catch the snitch. It’s just that it didn’t make sense at all that Krum was celebrated. Catching the snitch was worse than scoring an own goal in soccer because it directly and immediately caused his team to lose the match. The rioting of the death eaters after the match is understandable, but the way everyone else behaved towards this obvious fraud is not. The Ministry should have started a match fixing investigation.
The “reason” given in the books was that he knew they couldn’t out score Ireland to catch back up. Like resigning in chess.
bro quiddich is ass.
I’ve never really thought about it, but your right if you think about it, it makes zero sense.
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 Cuarón managed to achieve with Prisoner of Azkaban on screen however still gives me goosebumps… plotholes be damned lol
There’s a scene where lightning flashes and reveals (I think) Gary Oldman’s profile in the shadows of the clouds, and it was awesome.
The rest of the movie was confusing and boring as hell but the visuals were pretty good.
Not only that, but Rowling didn’t even dream up the world by all accounts. Just a bunch of plagiarized shit and racist stereotypes that happened to be the one which got extra popular.
I tend to stay away from the plagiarism argument, just because you can make a strong case that real human originality is exceptionally rare and most art is minimal transformation of a wide array of source material. Everything from the Illiad to Star Wars is derivative.
That said, her treatment of minotiries in Harry Potter is straight plagiarism of Confederate and Nazi ideology on slaves and untermensch. It surprised me that people were shocked at her “some people can’t be women” stance when she continuously played the “some people aren’t people” angle for laughs.
and the “but they want to be slaves. they are happier” bullshit. at least it was house elves and she didn’t have it be the castle brownies or something like that. her editor (read: dog) probably talked her out of that one
There is that, but her plagiarism was kinda close to Vanilla Ice saying that he didn’t sample Under Pressure. A little aggressive, especially for her inflated ego and billions of dollars.
Absolutely agree about the other part though. She didn’t need the money to make her a shitty person, that was all original.
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.
I got the strong impression that by around Book 4, she’d more or less offloaded the writing to ghost writers. The length of the material combined with a real drift in writing style to the formulaic made the latter books worse and worse with each release.
By book 7, it felt like they were cramming a whole second story inside the first, for no reason other than to up the page count.
When you’re presented with a world so incredible with an execution that’s lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over.
The whole early '00s Young Adult novel explosion was full of variations on Wizard High School. Lots of them were bad. Plenty of them were still beloved, for some seed of an idea or particularly compelling character that drove the next iteration of authors and screenwriters.
I like to think The Magicians is a good example of a second-order HP book (that I honestly didn’t love, but appreciated more after I got hooked on the TV show) playing with the root ideas and extending them in fun directions.
That’s why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive.
It’s just tiresome to see people call you a TERF because you enjoy a kid’s book.
A bit like screaming at someone wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt for being a fascist, because Walt Disney… was a fascist.
People take issue with giving more money to a person who has spent a good amount of her considerable wealth openly and maliciously harming trans people.
You’re not a TERF for being a HP fan, but you are directly funding TERFs if you buy HP merch or legally watch her stuff.
Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler
I still don’t get why the fuck she would put this 😭😭😭 she dabbled into Yaoi I guess.
Wizards didn’t need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book.
I don’t remember this ever being a thing, magicking away your excrement. Bathrooms are a plot in the first book too.
she tweeted the wizard shitter comment. She explained it that the bathrooms were a later addition to hogwarts after too many muggle born wizards were shocked at the lack of them. the ability to swiftly and cleanly vanish your shit from whatever corner of the castle you decided to drop it was meant to be some amazing revelation to her fans i guess. No thought went into what it meant for wizard kids up to 13 years old needing to have a parent or elder sibling clean up their turds for them since they weren’t allowed to perform magic.
Did she forget that the only entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was in a girl’s bathroom? The secret chamber built by one of the founding members during the initial construction has its only entrance in a room that was a later addition. Not even internally consistent with her own story.
IIRC, it wasn’t muggle shock, it’s just what wizards did up until plumbing was common. It does kind make one question why they would invest so much into fixing what they seemingly considered a solved issue though.
Yeah i’ve always felt that the castle is basically stuck on pre industrial revolution technology (the plumbing might be an exception). The rest of the wizard world seems to be stuck in late medieval period stylistically, or otherwise 1810’s. Clearly wizards are always a century or so behind on Muggle tech - fantastic beasts movies kind of ruined this but i did think that american wizards being into muggle tech and machinery was a nice touch and thematically congruent both with our own world and the HP world.
Hell of a comment + explanations. Thanks for the insights!
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 stock 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.
Isn’t the narrative that wizards act under a codex, not to use deadly spells? I mean, it’s still lazy, but that would be my interpretation. I haven’t read the books in quite a while though.
Yes, IIRC the “Unforgivable Curses” either carry a death penalty or wizard prison forever or something. But by the third or forth book every bad guy is a Wizard Nazi who doesn’t care about those consequences and the good guys are all fighting Wizard Nazis and are at least semi-justified in trying to kill them right back.
It basically devolves instantly into gun-fights, except instead of guns it’s a specific spell.
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.
You might enjoy Vinge’s Zones of Thought series.
The wizards in HP are a weird mixture of so reliant on magic that simple logic and basic low tech solutions to problems are mystifying, but also, they forget to use magic, like, all the time. They are always doing things like getting rained on when the impervious charm exists, forgetting that the accio charm exists when they need to grab something before someone else finds it, when they bind someone in shackles instead of magically stunning or binding them, when their clothes don’t fit, when they don’t just duplicate items that dont break Gamps laws, when they make Filch and Hagrid do so much manual labor that could be accomplished with swipe of a wand, etc.
Notably, they absolutely botch the “rescue” mission at the end of Order of the Pheonix and get Sirius killed in trying to save him becuase they fail to utilize the many magical means they have to communicate and travel.
First, they forget that Harry was given a magic mirror to contact Sirius at any time for moments just like this. But let’s chock that up to human error, fine.
But then they also forget that they have a contact in the castle that can also visit the Black house, the painting of Phineas Nigellus. Even if they aren’t sure they can get to the headmaster’s office (even though he definitely could as he does later in the book), they know that the painting’s inhabitants can travel between frames and could go to retieve him. But, ok, chock that up to human error number 2.
Instead they decide to break into Umbridge’s office to use her fireplace to speak to Sirius through the floo network. Cool. But then instead of just walking through and going look for him, Harry just sticks his head in and starts yelling which allows Kreacher to control the narrative and trick Harry into Voldemort’s plot. And of course he gets caught by Umbridge because his ass is still in her office (and Hermione gets caught too because she inexplicably rmeoved the invisibility cloak).
But then, even later when they get rid of Umbridge and her slytherin minions, and they are trying to figure out how to get to London, nobody realizes that Harry’s head was just fucking in London. The fireplace is completely unguarded now and they know you can floo in directly to the ministry. Alternatively, they could just get to Hogsmeade and hail the Knight Bus, or find a sympathetic adult who can do side along apparation to get them there immediately. Or go back to the castle and get Snape’s help getting there or to the Order.
Instead they ride the Thestrals which takes “several hours” to reach London by which time they should totally have expected Sirius to already be dead. They don’t bring the cloak to the ministry either even though they are under the impression that they will have to break in too. All of this is just dumb dumb dumb.
The fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a fun foil to this aspect of the series. It absolutely is a bit pretentious and preachy at points, but the genuine exploration of what is possible in the established system was pretty fun imo.
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.
Yeah soft magic requires restraint to do well. Sanderson’s laws are a really good way to make sure you’re not writing a really boring magic system.
Might be a time to plug my own writing.
Possessing a gem and training with it for a decade lets you use intense elemental magic of a certain attunement. BUT…those gems are so rare and take such vast resources of an empire to formulate, that their use is controlled to just three people. Anyone else who steals one won’t even be able to use it until they’ve practiced for an extraordinary amount of time. So, they’re like nukes; and no one can just nip in and steal them.
The story is about using non-magical means to solve societal problems.
EDIT: Actually, since this has 7 upvotes, maybe it’s time to plug it more directly.
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.
So, they do kinda explore this in the books. Book 4, when the kids learn the Killing Curses in Defense Against the Dark Arts, its implied that you really need to want to kill someone for the spell to work. Otherwise, it just kinda gives your victim a nose bleed.
There’s a secondary implication that Avada Kadavra is not just a simple killing curse, but a predicate for creating a Hoarcrux. In Book 6, Tom Riddle learns that you need to kill someone in order to create a Hoarcrux. And, as Harry Potter is a Hoarcrux created by accident when his mother shields him from Voldemort’s killing spell, there’s a presumed through-line that using the spell severs your own soul with every successful incantation.
So, the need to be fairly powerful, competent, and ruthless makes it more like going into a wizard duel with a blunderbuss than a Beretta. There are other spells that can kill (or immobilize in anticipation of a more traditional murder) with less effort. And - assuming the implications - no risk of shredding yourself internally to land a lethal blow.
Right but like, as an author you gotta ask yourself, “Hey, what if the rules of my world were conducive to interesting things instead?”
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…
He knew he wouldn’t win against a 1v1 power struggle with him, which is what casting a spell against a spell is in Harry Potter.
it’s just Dragonball Z again yes, as per usual.
This isn’t even my final horcrux
Wait it is? Fuck. Could you give me a week and maybe six, seven bodies?
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.
…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.
I feel like that isn’t a hypothetical…?
This isn’t a hypothetical thread. Rowling’s Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione’s actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.
The most heinous crime conceivable to a conservative like JKR is an attempt to change the status quo.
An obvious example: Sure we’re burning the world to the ground. But did you ever consider what if renewable energy is somehow even worse, and its advocates are terrorists?
Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….
And it gets worse when combined with Rowling’s later comments that she’d always imagined Hermione was black.
“Imagined” yet after all the book art and movie she never bothered to correct anyone? I smell some retconning BS there.
LOL JK
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.”
One of my favourite things is the running gag on Clickhole about her hacky ‘revelations’.
Major Bombshell: J.K. Rowling Has Revealed Daniel Radcliffe Is Chinese
And also under the influence of black mold
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 are children playing on their school team. Not really professionals
Yeah, that’s right.
Isn’t American football as asymmetric? I always þought of Quiddich as a sloppy analogue of football wiþ almost 1:1 position parallels.
Yes it is. It’s why it’s so popular in highschool. There is a role for most body types.
It’s why it’s so popular in highschool.
Citation needed.
I’m not arguing it doesn’t affect popularity, just that i don’t think it’s the main reason for the love, or really even in the top three.
Soccer is more uniform, yes? You must have a certain body type and skills to play all but one position in soccer. Same wiþ basketball. Baseball has more variability; look at Babe Ruth.
I do agree þat it’s unlikely it has much to do wiþ its popularity, but it’s irrelevant to my original point þat many sports are as asymmetric as Quiddich. Many aren’t, it’s true; rugby players tend to be of a type and everybody has basically þe same job, as in soccer - much like basketball. But asymmetry in team sports is not uncommon.
I actually have a citation for it 😄. But it’s going to take me awhile to find it. It’s from a thesis/book about the development of gridiron football from rugby. The highschool bit is a minor part of the overall thesis that the specialization mirrors the evolution of the assembly line and specialization of work positions from the generic tradesperson who is multi skilled.
I don’t know, I have no idea about gridiron.
Ngl, i never really looked much into irl quiddich. Making up a new game from scratch is really fucking hard, and she obviously couldn’t do it. There is a fantasy trilogy called kingkiller chronicles, and tgey made up a chess like game named tak. You can play it irl and it’s really interesting imo. If you know anything about humans and how they behave un sports or video games for example, you’d know that people would just stand around and waut for the magical winning ball. There ia no reason no one dropps everything they are doing to get the game winning ball. But they just keep playing. Thinking about it, is there a real reason the snitch exists? It could just be the game as it is and harry potter is pretty good at it. Is it so he can literally win games by himself? I have to stop thinking about that crap.
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
Do you ride around on fake brooms? Because that’s pretty cringe
Edit: Lol at people being butthurt about this. Try reading a book that isn’t written for children, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
Obviously not. They use real brooms. You can get them at the hardware store pretty cheap!
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
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 heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.
that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to “the other side”. i don’t think he did.
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Fascism is pretty well-defined. People just don’t like it because we like to pretend it’s a specter of the past far removed from modern sensibilities, and the definition exposes how not at all far it is from mainstream conservatism.
The mainstream definition of “woke” is “whatever MAGA was told to hate today”.
i think he’s more likely in the centrist position of “politics is when parties or banners or protests”
I am once again begging everyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea instead
It’s an exquisite book yes, but it’s from a different genre than HP is. If people are looking for light modern low-fantasy, they might not favor the deeper ends of high fantasy as a replacement
I liked The Magicians trilogy. Very deep and a great set of writing and plots and emotion and it makes a mockery of the fantasy worlds created by the likes of JK Rowling.
The show was very different but also excellent
Hope you guys have all read the book JK lifted from most heavily: Groosham Grange.
Groosham Grange is basically a short story with a surprisingly captivating worldbuilding, but suffering from being very unserious. It is also mocking of conservatives and christians in a way. I can therefore see why she would be like “i need to make a full series of books like this, but taking themselves seriously” but i wish she’d planned out the magic system a bit beforehand.
Hey that’s not true there were politics. Ministry bad and slow
Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.
It was more like HP using expelliarmus a billion times
Except for the one time he learned the Sectumsempra curse, used it one time on Draco Malfoy, and then we never talked about it again.
You’re talking about it…
We don’t talk about rectumsempra
Look she’s a cunt.
But y’all just look like angry nerds screeching over the meta of a childrens book. There are planet of children’s classics that are garbage.
She can be a cunt and also bad fantasy author. An opinion I never would have had if it weren’t for good fantasy authors
How many other bad authors get a new meme each week saying the same tired shit? Every fucking week lol.
I get it, JK and stories bad.
If it’s tired then post something new?
Is that Tim Curry
yeah. there’s no joke or anything I just wanted to post him in this thread
Delicious and Curry pilled.
Totally valid lmao
Most children’s book authors don’t engage in Holocaust denialism :/
Nor have organized politicall movements designed to vulnerable populations.
There are a planet of other posts you could have responded to. Why would you respond to this one?
I hope you get the point. You can make that same complaint about pretty much anything, which makes it pointless to bring up.
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? 🤔
That only happened because the wands both were using were from the same dragon or aardvark or whathaveyou.
Nah, it happens even when Voldemort was using Lucius Malfoy’s wand. The same core thingy only causes the wand to rewind the spell history backwards. Not sure how that would work outside of Avada Kedavra.
Ah, got my shenanigans mixed up. Danke!
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?
Snape used it on Dumbledore up the astronomy tower.
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
Ah, fuck, yep, I had it the other way around yeah.
No there was actually something in there about avada kedavra being bad for the soul (or something like that), though I’m not sure if that specific bit applied just to the spell or to killing in general.
its also easily traceable and under dementor death penalty or something
Is it? Wasn’t Voldemort using it without being traced?
The Dementors were originally on his side.
Ah, you’re right.
Isn’t there explanations for why people dont just use it willy nilly?
They don’t learn it because “iTs ilLeGaL”
I’d like to think that it’s hard to learn but the books don’t imply as such and the hogwarts legacy video game implies that it’s easier to learn than crucio or imperio.
Makes sense. If the rule is some one needs to want the effect of one of those curses. I think wanting to torture someone is quite beyond wanting to just kill them.
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.
C-c-c-counterspellll!!
I stand corrected
The other guy counterspells your counterspell (I hate what they did to that spell in DnD 5e).
Also there are more ways to stop Power Word Kill than counterspell. It requires a verbal component so if you can prevent the caster from speaking they can’t cast it. It’s an instant death effect so the spell Death Ward also protects you from it’s effects. Oh it only has a 60 ft range so you can just stay out of the range of the spell and just negate it.
mtg, but it only benefits the counterspeller, unless you have a spell that cant be countered.
And if you have 100+ hp, it just won’t affect you in 2014 rules. 12d12 psychic in 2024 for that case though.
yeah, wild finding out that was a thing. at least pathfinder had other weird shit you could do with dispel magic, like steal their spells or inflict magical backlash damage.
I hope I never play a game where every wizard has to have a finger on the “save me from scary magic” button. no, fuck it. we ball in here
In older DnD editions it was more complex and honestly cooler. You had to expend a spell to counterspell, usually the same spell the enemy was trying to cast or a spell that negated their spell. For example you could cast Haste to counterspell a Slow spell or a Cure Wounds spell to negate an Inflict Wounds one. It made it more involved than: snap and your spell fails.
I remember that. Wizard gameplay should feel like this
It can be defended against by the Noh-You spell and reflected back
She did explicitly state that it can’t be blocked or defended against, but it comes out later that this only means through magical defense of a direct hit. It can be physically deflected - so indirectly defended against. Dumbledore uses magic to move a statue into the way and protect himself and Harry. This was in the fifth book though, so it’s definitely possible she retconned it after criticism
Gives off the “Why didn’t they just fly eagles into Mordor?” vibes.
That is a fucking fairy tale book for children and teens. What did you expect? Logical structure like in 1984 or something?
Except the Eye would have seen flying eagles. Not that it doesn’t ever see Frodo, but the point of the mission is discretion so they can avoid the Nazgûl as much as possible.
The difference here is that lifting the curtain gives a reasonable discussion of why a seeming plot hole couldn’t happen. But it raises massive world implications in HP.
A minimal level of coherency would be nice. Even fairy tales operate within a world with some rules.
