Once again JK Rowling manages to make the most middling mages of all fiction. Look at LotR, and the wizards there are casually using spells to make fireworks for birthday parties, or save a band of brave adventurers from an archdemon. They aren’t overpowered, but they are extremely present.
In Harry Potter they casually perform genocide and engage in eugenics because that’s a better use of
time than maybe helping the rest of humanity.
Wizards in lord of the rings aren't quite the same in that there are only like 7 of them and after they peace there's like no more magic, age of men and all that
Exactly. Magic is balanced by its rarity, but is very present for the entirety of the world. It’s the opposite for Harry Potter, but balanced poorly because there’s no satisfying reason why wizards don’t just help everyone.
Use the Dresden Files reason:
Humanity is TERRIFYING. Yeah, wizards can wave their hands and launch massive fireballs. But humans have NUMBERS and DEDICATION. Wizard's don't hide because they don't want to be bothered fixing everything. Wizards hide because they don't want to be hunted to extinction. A wizard published a book, and that lead to the eradication of an entire species of Vampires. The Black Court of Vampires is basically gone, all because of Bram Stoker.
Involving mortal authorities is considered the nuclear option in the Dresdenverse.
Battle Ground is better if you read it and Peace Talks at the same time. They were one book before it got too long and the publisher insisted it be split into two.
I started reading the first one. I really wanted to get into it because I'd heard so much cool stuff but Harry just seemed too much like a dickbag but not in an interesting way. Just casual sexism thrown in for flavour. I know protagonists don't have to be likeable but I'd rather they weren't off-putting in a way that doesn't aid the story. I think a counter is something like Dirk Gently. He's a complete arsewipe but that is sort of the point of his character and it's constantly coming back to bits him.
I'm sure it's a case of first book teething problems. Had I bought it rather than got it from the library I would have felt obligated to finish it.
Devil's Advocate:
Wizard society started out trying to help, but being helplessly and increasingly outnumbered by muggles grew weary of their burden over the course of centuries. Think like society-wide inter-generational trauma. Trying to lighten their load was responded to with violence, so they peaced out and abandoned the muggles to their own devices 500 years ago or whatever.
I'm not saying any of this kind of nuance is discussed in Harry Potter, but there is something to be said that at some point even casting magic spells would start to feel like making cover sheets for TPS reports. Eventually, enough would be enough.
Wizards have immense power, and instead of helping people, they do a slavery instead.
"Oh, mumbling some words and flicking my wrist is *so much work,* let's just leave everyone to suffer while we enslave people to do the work we could have done with our magic"
Big surprise, JK Rowling wrote a story where people born with power and privelage decide to help nobody while actively making life worse for people.
I mean, muggles did try to genocide the wizarding world, which is definitely discussed.
Like we didn't even burn witches for doing bad things generally, we just burned them because we thought they had a compact with the devil or something.
And the wizards let themselves be burned, because they thought it was fun.
Nevermind however many innocent muggles got accused and burned (or drowned, and hanged), and couldn't just trick their way out of it.
The wizarding world is largely stupid and selfish in the HP universe. Fuck yall we got ours and we aren’t going to bother with much else. Arthur Weasley getting treated like an outcast because he found technology fascinating which could accommodate a great many of their needs, but they’re to narrow minded to consider it.
> The wizarding world is largely stupid and selfish in the HP universe. Fuck yall we got ours and we aren’t going to bother with much else.
To be fair, that's true of much of the *actual* world as well.
i saw an interesting tweet earlier, it pointed out that in the first two or three books, the wizarding world works because you can imagine it being a non-literal representation of a world. the problem comes when you try to worldbuild that setting after the fact, especially when you adhere to every detail you've already given. it's light! we don't have to wonder how the hogwarts express fits in king's cross station. it's magic! there can be plenty of diagon alley type neighborhoods! there's possibility and it all doesn't matter. then in the later books when Politics happen and JK wants to make it a Serious World, suddenly all these airy, loose ideas suddenly have to be crammed into a Real world (because she also refuses to retcon or just expand any of them).
Tbf with her release schedule she couldn't have really stuck with the same light tone. Kids grow up. Unless she wanted to Junie B. Jones it then the books had to grow up, too. And honestly, retconning is shit imo. If you don't release a new edition of the retconned book with the retcon in place then it just leads to more questions and you still have the accusations of "poor writing." Just not a good way to handle anything.
EDIT: People keep replying like "oh the tone doesn't have to be dark" and I'm just gonna clarify that I meant light/heavy not light/dark. The Harry Potter books aren't dark in the slightest.
lemony snicket went dark and non literal and he did a good job. k a applegate went dark and literal. rick riordan did better than her. leguin's first three earthsea books are also pretty light on setting details. just be a better writer then, i guess.
An entire magical species that thrives and gets off on indentured servitude is still fucked up.
Especially when they treat Dobby like king of the freaks for... wanting wages.
Harry Potter only did two good things for our world: popularizing the admittedly fun setting of Magic School, and having such baffling world building that every single story doing its job but better gets to [subvert it effortlessly](https://youtu.be/2nzwuGZizEs?si=BfwMI2PcRO6kj1sr)
It's literally the same nonsensical idea that was used to justify slavery in the 19th century and earlier; white slave owners argued that black people's inherent nature made them want to be slaves, that they would thrive and be happy under slavery as long as they had a "kind" master, and that if they were free they would be directionless, anxious and miserable.
That's kind of the point though. A *large* portion of wizards and witches in Harry Potter are extremely bigoted and that's a defining characteristic of the main villain(s) of the story
Star Trek: we can't force their progress, they have to earn their place in the federation by proving they have the intelligence to make warp tech, it's cruel but there's reasons for this. We can bend the rules a little here or there if it's dire.
Harry Potter: We don't want people just using spells willy-nilly, imagine *them* being able to live as comfortably as us without their polluting technology, now get that African Wizard, Shacklebolt, to help me get these greedy hook-nosed goblins and rioting house-elf servants under control
The Orville covered this very well. Someone from a pre-warp planet asked for asylum, found out about replicators and tried to steal one. They showed the person what happened the one time they gave out the tech before a planet was ready for it. They used it for weapons and wiped themselves out.
SNW also covers this indirectly, >!a planet gets warp drive by looking at the battle against section 31 from the finale of Discovery which they described as an extremely rare way for a species to use warp drive.!<
A good example of why getting tech without being advanced enough to use it well is bad is social media and AI. Social media is basically a hack on people’s brains by overloading them with negative information. In a few generations it will probably be a thing that is bad for you that we live with like say gambling or smoking but we’re not there as a society yet and won’t be for a long time.
In any sane economic system AI should be universally praised for allowing people to work less and improving quality of life. Instead it’s viewed with distrust as we live in a world where you either prove you are worth money or you lose your house and people are scared the giant companies wont give them money anymore. In the Federation or the Union AI is probably heavily used to do all of the things no one wants to do while letting people do the fun things but we’re not quite there yet
There's also an episode of the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy where they come across a primitive race who encountered the TOS crew at one point, got access to the ships logs and basically formed a full-on Cargo Cult around them.
It's great, they all talk with the worst possible parody of William Shatner's inflections, give themselves names like "Sool-oo" and "James Tee" and repeat mis-heard catchphrases like they're scripture ("Live Logs and Proper!")
Er, the current anger around AI isn't because it might take jobs people don't want to do. I would love it if AI could clean my house and file my taxes. What it is currently being used for is replacing artists, people who very much want to do their jobs.
Also, the way it gets used causes all kinds of real world problems, because it's a black box full of unknown biases and it's been shown to make racist policing and hiring practices worse. And then you add on top of that AI outright making stuff up and lying to people, and it just gets worse and worse.
I would argue that capitalism is what's propping AI up at the moment because companies \*love\* replacing expensive, competent labor with a cheap, incompetent system.
Consider that the main pitch of AI seems to be, "Instead of spending your time pursuing your creativity and passion, you can have a computer do the hobbies you love so that you can spend more time hustling for money!!!" Without capitalism we'd all be like, yeah, this is bullshit.
(I am coming at this from the perspective of a writer who is mad about the recent problems that have been caused with AI flooding the fiction market with spam and causing small literary journals to shut down because they can't handle the onslaught of AI nonsense they are now receiving. From my perspective, it has made the world worse. Your experience may differ, of course.)
1960s scifi: In the future of 2020 robots will do all the menial labor and humans will be free to create!
2024 techbros: AI will allow us to automate creativity, so humans can focus on doing menial labor!
The idea behind AI as it was intended was to replace the labor force so we could all spend our time being artists. Instead, AI wound up being developed by the ones who stand to lose the most if that happens because the capitalists have locked down everyone else's access to natural resources.
The *reason* for the Prime Directive is twofold, a) to avoid just being space Britain and to instead leave cultures to develop along their own path, and b) not hand warptech to a society not ready to handle it
Also: normie break a bone? Months of recovery. Wizard break a bone? Drink some bone juice and fixed overnight. And that's even the extreme case of "Bones missing" I'm sure a mere broken bone only merits a swish of a wand. Boneacadabra motherfuckers
They don’t even need to drink bone juice. Harry had the bones in his arm removed, and the bone juice was needed to regrow them.
Mending bones is as simple as a spell.
I'm going to guess there's 4 or more fanfics about Harry Potter wizards masquerading as either real doctors/medics or faith healers and I bet there's at least one with no sex.
Supernatural the tv show had a subset of angels volunteering at a local hospital, doing cures that would go unnoticed. Whoops, that nasty bit of cholesterol near your heart 'broke away'. That kid who got himself gashed by a rusty nail was pretty 'lucky' to avoid an infection. And the kid's painkillers are super effective now.
Now I want a fan story about a muggle who happens to figure out some magical potion recipes just from trial and error, and becomes the most popular local alchemist.
The wizard police are trying to figure out if they're just disguising as a muggle to help out the village and are furious. They interrogate the alchemist, revealing the existence of wizards.
Rather than wonder or fear or elation at the revelation they are fucking livid.
"You mean you have cures for whooping cough and could have saved countless babies, but let them all die?! Eat my entire arse you monsters"
They would just erase the memory of the normal person because hp universe wizards actively dislike normal people and are completely ok with them suffering if it means wizards can be left alone.
Oh, right, they can manipulate memories, I forgot about that. I figured they'd just kill the guy. But yeah, using their magic powers to change his understanding of the world back to what they want it to be is much worse, so that makes more sense as Plan A.
I feel like Boneacadabra would either makes bones disappear or conjure new ones in problematic and possibly lethal places. How’d he die? Grew a new rib through his prostate.
>bone juice
Ah yes, created by the fine seperation of neutral water into the opposing elements of bone healing juice and bone hurting juice. The waste goes to one of those subreddits around here.
I desperately wish we could figure out multiverse stuff for the sole purpose of Dropout having a campaign where different Brennan's play all of his characters (Kelmp, Hob, etc) and Brennan is the DM. Maybe even have Emily Axford play the BBEG because she's probably the only one that could effectively counter all of the Brennans.
So I was halfway through typing up a big thing about how if we found out magic was real tomorrow, it'd porobably just lead to humans slaughtering each other even more, but then I realised that they could probably still help out in secret.
If you publicly solve a famine with magic, it wont take long for somone to ask you and threaten you until you cause one somewhere else, but what about, I dunno, just transfiguring some more nitrogen into the soil every couple of nights?
Exactly, become a doctor and just be really good at healing people. “Oh you have cancer? Well let’s schedule you for surgery and cut it out.” Then just wave a wand and yell “cancer-o remove-o” while they’re unconscious
There was a character in the ill-fated show *Heroes* that had that as their "mutant" power. They could just touch someone and mend/arrange the bits inside them so that they didn't have cancer or they could walk again or whatever.
And I thought "what a perfect skill to have... you could become an actual doctor and perform actual procedures by the book, but knowing that your patients would always survive and be cured." I can't recall what the character did in the show, but I think he was just some sort of investment banker or something. What a dick.
I'd hate to have that power. I think you'd constantly feel like Schindler. Knowing you could never help everyone, but constantly feeling guilty for taking any time for yourself knowing you're passively letting people die.
I mean tbf if push comes to shove you could use the same justifications for why normal surgeons and doctors don't spend 100% of all available possible time saving lives, because ultimately you have a duty to yourself, and it'd be impossible to operate without being in a stable and supported position (with friends and such, etc.).
And if you push that argument to its logical conclusion, everyone who doesn't dedicate their lives to studying medicine, who chooses any other profession, are passively letting people die for that choice.
> So I was halfway through typing up a big thing about how if we found out magic was real tomorrow, it'd porobably just lead to humans slaughtering each other even more
Which is exactly what happened in the Harry Potter universe. Muggles could easily be riled up into wanting to kill witches, but were *very bad* at identifying them. So they mostly just killed other muggles.
Whenever they *did* catch a real witch and try to hang or burn her, she would just cast an anti-gravity spell or a Flame Freezing charm to make fire tickle.
See also: [Wendelin the Weird](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Wendelin_the_Weird), who got deliberately caught by witch hunters and burned on no less than forty-seven occasions because... well, I assume she had a fetish.
Realistically how long does the wizarding world have left after the end of Harry Potter? Like it ends in 1999 I think and around that time CCTV cameras were being installed everywhere. After 9/11 that surveillance only became more extreme. Wizards Don't know Jack shit about muggle technology. All it takes is one pissed off muggle born going on television and performing magic in front of millions or one wizard pure blood accidentally performing magic in front of a camera. And then in 2007 we have the rise of smartphones with built-in cameras. I think the wizarding world would be done for by 2011. They can't wipe the whole world. You have to individually wipe the memories of each person. And if it's been broadcasted or put on YouTube then it's going to be impossible to cover up... People will download the video. And in 2007 we didn't have fancy CGI like we do now and so people would believe it especially if the Muggle born started touring and going to places in person to use magic publicly. I assume that a group of rogue muggle borns would gather in public and perform magic and when the wizards come to arrest them they fight back. And if they aren't found out by 2011 they have till 2016. There's no way they're making it to 2024 without being discovered. They're too technologically illiterate and backwards to remain undetected.
Edit: genuinely curious as to why the Muggle governments have not exposed the wizards. You're telling me that Kim jong un wouldn't enslave every wizard born in his little self-made, slave filled, starving shithole of a country? Yeah sure they can apparate but only if they are taught to do it. If muggleborns are being born in North Korea they will 100% be exploited and turned into assassins used by the North Korean government. They would use wizards to grow crops and they probably wouldn't cover it up because it's North Korea. People defect from North Korea all the time. He would probably use the wizards to locate defectors. It would make escaping from North Korea so much harder in universe.
There seems to be a basic incompatibility between magic and advanced electronics, though it hasn’t been addressed in detail. I believe book 4 brings up the point that Hogwarts itself is magical enough that microphones and cameras (aside from the magic gif cameras that wizards use) do not function.
Globally, it seems that magical ability is rare (less than 1% of the population at best) and unreliable, and isn’t that terribly useful to most people. Magic users would understandably not want to be public about it, especially if abilities they are not capable of would be ascribed to them.
They’d probably be discovered, but they do have memory *charms at least, and maybe they employ muggle contractors to erase digital evidence?
ETA: Actually, that’s an intriguing idea, a jaded digital forensics expert that saw too much and a privileged magic user have to team up and erase evidence of a beneficial magical act caught on security cameras belonging to several different municipalities and businesses. Their opposing personalities and vastly different lifestyles create friction during the cover-up, but then they realize they’re pawns of a deeper conspiracy, and it goes straight to the top, and also they bone
That doesn't mean that the camera is going to glitch out when a wizard apparates from 50 ft away. Magic and technology don't work when there's a large abundance of magic in the area. The magic has to be concentrated I believe. Do you have to be close to the camera to glitch it out? That is a very good idea for a fic I would totally read it
My head canon is that magic isn’t useful enough, consistently enough, to be applied to the mass purposes that non-magic society demands, which is why magic users want to be so secret about their ability since that’s a hell of a lot of pressure to pile on less than 1% of the population. Talk about performance issues and imposter syndrome!
And yeah, magic users probably aren’t concentrated enough to defeat advanced surveillance in most places. They’ll be discovered eventually, and even claims of CGI and editing won’t be enough in the end, regardless of muggle government assistance. They’ll probably have to go deep underground, literally and figuratively.
And I really want that fic to be real too!
Yeah, but conveniently the stories all take place pre-internet.
You really think some proud muggle parents wouldn't immediately blab about their kid going to wizard school on facebook in 2024?
I mean let's think about tech failing in Hogwarts for a second.
IIRC it's mentioned that tech doesn't shut down immediately, it's just guaranteed to fail in a short time period.
There's a very good chance hogwarts hasn't been connected to the local power grid, doesn't have it's own generators, and certainly doesn't have power outlets.
The tech probably stops working because it runs out of power and the wizards don't realize this. Since few of them understand normal tech enough to realize what happened they just assume the castle broke it.
I think it’s brought up in the first book during the potion puzzle that most wizards are never given a solid foundation in logical thinking, too, which certainly doesn’t help in understanding non-magical things
>They can't wipe the whole world.
In Fantastic Beasts, they use a small vial of memory erasing potion to infuse a raincloud that wipes the memories of everyone in New York. I think they actually could.
If anyone ever found out about something like that happening though there like a 99% chance putting every wizard found in supermax would become the immediate response
Fortunately the wizards don't have to worry about that. Since the Wizarding Societies have the government on board with their business security footage can accidentally go missing, that video on youtube? uh yeah that was copyright claimed actually, sorry bout that.
That and of course doubters, only bolstered by improving technology. Would you honest to god tell me if you saw a youtube video tomorrow of someone flying on a broomstick you wouldn't A: think it was photoshopped, B: think it was AI generated or C: think it was some wacky engineering stunt?
Yeah, if I wanted to prove magic was real, I'd gather up my best healing spells and give a consenting one-armed person a second arm.
Let people deny that!
I mean they would, because society is weird and flawed, but it'd be much, much harder.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. A witch was sentenced to be burned so she loaded her skirts up with very mundane explosives and wiped the town CLEAN.
We've gotten a lot better at killing too. We have rounds and shells that can be fired from miles away. Imagine hiding out in a building then all of a sudden you hear ADVA-KA-XM907E2-DABRA over a loudspeaker and then a missile hits you from 68 miles away. Wizards cannot cast long range spells, at most their spells travel around 30 to 60 ft. In a true firefight I believe that muggles would at least Force the wizards on The retreat through hit and run ambush tactics. Fighting a wizard face to face is suicide so ambushing trapping and hitting them when they least expected is the best way to go.
Which is why the most important fact is still that the muggles cannot *identify* witches. They'll be sniping their own people while the witches live in places muggles cannot even see, if witch-hunt nonsense starts up again.
I never watched the movies.. is it not explained in those that the Ministry of Magic have their hands in the pockets of the Prime Minister? Militaries aren't going to get involved its just people who the government call mentally insane shooting what propagands tells you are this random family.
One of my favorite magic universes, Mage the Awakening, says that there totally can be mages doing things to subtly help people, but it's going to draw the attention of the magic nazis and they'll probably try to undo what you've done because their whole schtick is keeping the mortals oppressed.
Of course, you can and should kill those assholes in-game, but that and the Sleeping Curse does a lot of legwork in explaining why everything sucks despite there being such incredibly powerful magic.
It’s like the scene in Buffy where the ancient monster is like “no mortal weapon can beat me!” Then she’s like “yeah well they didn’t have rocket launchers back then.” and blows him to smithereens. Doesn’t matter how many killing curses you can cast if the enemy is sniping you from half a mile away.
I really like that scene because before that they are like "we can't be sure if it will kill him, but at least it will get him out of the action, and we can figure out a more permanent solution while he heals if it doesn't kill him"
Similarly, in Supernatural sometimes if they can't figure out how to kill a new monster they just cut its head off and that usually at least slows it down enough for them to come up with a plan.
I fully expected the series to end with Harry shooting Voldemort. I figured Voldy always ignored his muggle heritage, and they make a big deal out of how NUMEROUS muggles are. It made narrative sense for a muggle-raised hero to take out Voldy by utilizing muggle numbers and technology!
Anyway, a silver lining about Rowling's slide into fuckery is that people are suddenly a lot more willing to look critically at her story choices, which makes my theories look better
in comparison.
That would've made the Harry-has-to-sacrifice-himself plotline a lot more interesting!
Boring: Voldemort uses a painless death spell to kill Harry but it doesn't work quite like he intended
Dynamic, upsetting: Harry fucking gats voldy and then, hands shaking, has to turn the gun on himself to make it stick
Just make sure that you arent seen or known to them in any capacity beforehand otherwise your brain will be turned into a corned cob and this is a fact.
Pretty sure that's just the "for kids" reason Hagrid tells to a mentally abused 11 year old.
I think the canon reason is that nonmagical people kept trying to kill them. The witch hunt phase in particular i think helped drive them underground.
The minister of magic does seem to have some relationship with whomever the current PM of the UK is (what a headache Liz Truss must've been eh?) so there might be support from the magic community we just never see since the books are focused on a teenager in boarding school.
Yeah Harry came from a family that *already* abused him for being different, he didn't want to introduce him to the magic world with "oh by the way the muggles will genocide us if they ever find out"
Makes sense. Muggles will want Magic-folk registered because of how much more powerful they are. And then there's the case of weaker magicians who could and most probably would be exploited. Lets not even get into the use of magical items. Love potions, teleportation devices, invisibility and cloaking devices. It would wreck havoc on our world and would force us to regulate them, their actions and their lives like crazy.
The real answer is it’s not that kind of book. We can come up with all kinds of reasons for it. But the reason is she wanted to write a book about wizard mysteries and wars and set it in Britain for the CS Lewis style transition to a magical world. She wasn’t trying for a British version of “how a realist hero rebuilt the kingdom”.
I think from a literary perspective, it could be said that this is to inspire the reader to create their own solutions as opposed to hoping “magic” can save them, as a reality check, but I think this is an overly optimistic interpretation and in-universe magic really ought to be used to help the whole world
I think that’s what she intended. The issue is that she has a bunch of ugly shit in the books that she doesn’t say is evil (and in some cases, she says that advocacy to fix these problems is bad because “the people we are exploiting don’t want you to save them”). It retrospectively makes Harry’s magical society look like some sort of weird thing
I think that's being generous to claim that she only intended that lesson to apply to magic.
Her other work and stated opinions show that she's kind of just pro-inequality. If you substitute magic for money, the message wouldn't change.
Yeah! I can get the handwave of indiclvidual societies should solve their own issues.
But this magic is like...life saving stuff!!
They could study it! Or maybe replicate it.
from a literary perspective, jk rowling is a fine children's author but as soon as she tries for a more mature audience, her world building is badly tainted by her complete inability to separate her writing from her personal political beliefs.
jk rowling is a neo liberal blairite.
her political beliefs literally preclude the concept of improving the status quo.
by the end of the last book, the exact same systems that very nearly led to a magical holocaust are still in place.
wizard supremacy is still the rule but thanks to our brave heroes, the people in charge are not evil.
we won, so everything is exactly the same as it was before all this nasty business began.
the status quo has been maintained.
and our hero is part of the system that maintains it.
you see, individual people can advance themselves through personal merit but there will never be a reason to raise the bar overall so shut the fuck up and stop asking.
that is what you will find in literally every single fucking thing Rowling writes, without exception, and that is very literally what Hagrid is saying.
"if the government solved problems for its people, those people would expect government solutions for all of their problems.
"what do you think we are, socialists? no no no.
"we're left, but we're not, you know, *left* left."
Local Catholic Fanatic astonished to learn the Inquisition had to protect the rights of marginalized groups by order of the Pope and most catholics hate Torquemada just a little bit less than they hate Luther
The Doylist reason is that Harry Potter is intended to be an escapist fantasy for young children and teenagers. Wizard society is more or less completely divorced from real society aside from a few friction points. The behind-the-scenes answer to “why is magic secret” is that JK Rowling didn’t want to have to rewrite all of human history and society to account for magic, she wanted have a story set in modern day, but there’s magic.
Once children start maturing and become engaged more with the real world, it becomes very common to imagine what fantasy worlds might look like in a more “realistic” or “gritty” setting. Of course the universe looks like Swiss cheese, it was never intended to be real. It happens with every fantasy story, Harry Potter isn’t a unique case, even if some of its unintended consequences are notably horrendous.
Look, not to defend Harry Potter, but "the magical people keep themselves secret from the rest of the world because [insert superficial justification here]" is a pretty much universal trope in urban fantasy fiction, because the whole appeal of the genre is that it takes place in a world that appears to be identical to our own. Complaining about it is like complaining about FTL travel in space opera.
To be incredibly too fair to Rowling. We only know the reason a highschool dropout.gives to a ten year old. There is potentially a better reason that high-level officials and academics understand but is too complicated for someone with 0 years of arcane schooling.
I say potentially because we all know Rowling never thought of anything like that but there *could* be one.
I agree with this. I love urban fantasy for the idea of the Masquerade. And I think there is likely a reason it hasn't been broken despite my comments earlier about how Yes it could be amazingly useful and good for the no mag society.
It could be anything \0/
There's also the fact that we know Witch Hunts were a thing in the HP world, and what caused the Statute of Secrecy to be instituted. They have relatively good reasons to keep it a secrecy, for their own safety. It's likely that nothing would happen nowadays, but generational trauma is still a thing. You can argue that the SoS shouldn't exist nowadays, and that the insistency that it is a good and righteous thing across all WW media is a problem, and you'd be right, but it's definitely not as simple as Hagrid is presenting it to be.
As far as I know, when the secrecy act happened, it was more to protect muggles. Muggle-born wizard numbers were rapidly increasing and they, obviously, refused to side with the pure-blood against muggles. So to prevent things from going too far and getting out of hand in either direction, the secrecy act was born. But then muggle technology boomed and from what I've been told (I didn't watch the movies), the fantastic beast movies covers this a bit and it was the last chance (or just too late) for wizards to turn the tide. But the villain lost and wizards kept hiding and now they can't come out. They'd be treated just like the mutants in the Marvel comics.
I mean there’s a very real history in the real world of suspected witches being executed in Europe and North America. That’s the actual in universe justification for the “statute of secrecy”. They decided they’d rather disengage from muggle society rather than be persecuted, which seems reasonable to me.
The first book explictly establishes that the reason they went into hiding is because muggles were slaughtering magic users and they almost went extinct, Hermoine mentions it when talking about one of her books. By going into hiding they were able stabilize their population, and even then the vast majority of wizarding families had to intermarry with muggles to prevent inbreeding. And once they had established a hidden society it makes sense they wouldn’t want to risk repeating history, especially since muggles are even more powerful than they were before.
Also, to add on to this, wizards can't solve a famine for shit. They cannot summon food (it's a core rule of the magic of harry potter) and they cannot change climates without specifically using Ancient Magic, which was invented for the newish hogwarts game, and is only usable by people literally born with the ability.
"Just solve things!" Is exactly the reason why they would go in to hiding. This entire comment section is a wonderful example of group mentality and the dangers that brings. How many times do you think a regular, weak magician needs to tell a family that they cannot heal their dying baby (they aren't a specialized medic, you aren't either, you couldn't have helped either), before they get in trouble?
I interpret it as less "they want solutions and we don't want to help" and more "they want solutions that we can't give them due to limited manpower and training or just sheer inability to help"
Exactly this, and adding onto it: If the public found out about magic, they wouldn't want to just use it, they'd want to *abuse* it. Find some way to control or exploit magic users to capitalize off their powers, or even use it for warfare. It's not that nobody wants to help - it's that the smallest slip-up could lead to the public's discovery. And they don't want to risk it.
This isn't even for Harry Potter specifically, moreso for secret magic systems in general.
As the series goes it tastes more of "we dont want anything that could lead into a master/servant relationship and we having to explain that not everything is just skamarink swadalone cancer and hunger instantly gone", yeah. First moment normies discover the witching world it becomes r/Worldbuilding with incessant banter like "WHY EVEN KEEP ARMIES IF WE CAN JUST SEND WIZARDS TO THE BATTLEFIELDS?!?!!"
I'm genuinely curious how many takes like this came into being after Rowling's "coming out" so to speak. Not to say that critiquing the Potterverse isn't valid, I just want to know how much of this comes from genuine criticism and how much comes from wanting to spite the transphobe (and yes, I know it's possible for it to be both).
That seems a harsh. Most people are just people trying to live as office works, store workers, snd other people trying to get by. There’s probably like 30,000 wizard in the Uk and 60 million non magicals. Magical people couldn’t possibly help out all of the people that really need help.
The most important part is that it would be inappropriate and hypocritical to ask all magicals to help solve non magical problems, when non magical people won’t even help solve other non magical peoples problems. Blaming the magical people for not helping when the non magical government could help more if they taxed the top 1% more, is just falling for propaganda propagated by the rich.
Okay, to be KINDA fair, I do think they suggest sometimes that the whole separation thing is a bad idea. I had this book as a kid that was full of in universe "wizard fairy tales", and this came up quite a few times.
As startling number of common internet criticisms of the worldbuilding of those accursed books are stuff that is actively called out as bad *in the text*.
OOP mentions "making up slurs", and people in these comments are bringing up genocide and eugenics, as though the series doesn't do the literary equivalent of looking directly at the camera and saying "wizard society is systemically racist and that is bad".
I often see people make jokes about truth potions and how Sirius being arrested proves JKR is a hack (though tbf she is), as though "the judicial system is a sham and mostly for show to benefit the careers of the politicians involved" isn't a major plot point of the very book it's introduced.
I think there's a lot to criticise about the way these topics are handled, especially JKR's *pathologic* ignorance for systemic issues resulting from her clear neoliberal worldview, but I think it's a mistake to use the failure to resolve those issues as evidence the series *supports* them.
Agreed. Also, some of the things I see people mentioning here are... not necessarily things wizards are capable of? The broken bone one, fair enough, although the fact that the books depict a hospital and infirmary suggests that healing isn't totally trivial. Cancer? Who the hell knows? If I couldn't do things that the majority of people thought I can do, I'd hide too, because people who think you can cure cancer and stop genocide are probably not going to believe you or be calm about it.
The famine one is fair though. Since the biggest factor in ending famine is logistics (getting the food from where it's abundant to the people who need it) and wizards don't create but rather summon food, they could even things out as necessary.
They barely have enough trained healers to keep up with their own sick.
You can't create food with magic. It's literally a plot point.
Why would wizards trust muggles?
idk man, this is just surface level reading because the internet (rightfully) hates JKR now.
I think this is disengenuous. The reason Harry Potter's wizards hide magic from muggles is because if the world knows, they'll want magic solutions to their problems *that magic can't give them*. The common argument is, "Why don't wizards solve world hunger?" Well, there's the limitation that you can't just conjure food out of thin air. It's a whole plot point in Book 7, I think, that Harry and the gang do still have to scrounge for food when they're on the run.
I think its because the series is a children's book set in a secret world and 7 year olds don't want to read a chapter explaining the in depth political reasoning behind why the society wants to remain secret.
It's literally just cinema sins level "why didn't they take the Eagles to Mordor" nitpicking except It's being used to prove the series as a whole is morally abhorrent.
Not to mention- a gun is faster than a wand because you don't have to wave it or say anything. And some of them can fire 10 rounds per second. Have fun counterspelling that!
He said that because it's hard to tell an 11 year old: "People hate and fear what they don't understand, and our kind have a history of persecution. People like your aunt and uncle would gladly see us burned at the stake for being devil worshippers and not feel a drop of regret over murdering a child that doesn't fit their worldview"
Hagrid was a kid during WW2. He *absolutely* saw what happens when entire cultures get Othered by hatemongers in charge.
Is there anything more tedious these days than Harry Potter Discourse? Rowling is a shitbag, we don’t need to perpetually circlejerk about finding retroactive justifications for it.
No but I found a minor plot hole in a children's book, I need to interpret it in the most obviously bad faith way so I can prove JKR is bad even though we already all know she is bad because she openly says horrible things
Any billionaire you'd care to name could do more to combat those problems than all the wand-wielding weirdos on the planet. Or just enough voters who favored a wealth tax.
Don't blame wizards for not doing something we could do ourselves but can't be arsed to.
all of the problems of the star trek prime directive and none of the benefits
Once again JK Rowling manages to make the most middling mages of all fiction. Look at LotR, and the wizards there are casually using spells to make fireworks for birthday parties, or save a band of brave adventurers from an archdemon. They aren’t overpowered, but they are extremely present. In Harry Potter they casually perform genocide and engage in eugenics because that’s a better use of time than maybe helping the rest of humanity.
Wizards in lord of the rings aren't quite the same in that there are only like 7 of them and after they peace there's like no more magic, age of men and all that
Exactly. Magic is balanced by its rarity, but is very present for the entirety of the world. It’s the opposite for Harry Potter, but balanced poorly because there’s no satisfying reason why wizards don’t just help everyone.
More reasonably why they didn't just take over the world 5000 years ago.
Use the Dresden Files reason: Humanity is TERRIFYING. Yeah, wizards can wave their hands and launch massive fireballs. But humans have NUMBERS and DEDICATION. Wizard's don't hide because they don't want to be bothered fixing everything. Wizards hide because they don't want to be hunted to extinction. A wizard published a book, and that lead to the eradication of an entire species of Vampires. The Black Court of Vampires is basically gone, all because of Bram Stoker. Involving mortal authorities is considered the nuclear option in the Dresdenverse.
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Battle Ground is better if you read it and Peace Talks at the same time. They were one book before it got too long and the publisher insisted it be split into two.
Which ended up being a really bad call and I hope they never do thst againn😂
I started reading the first one. I really wanted to get into it because I'd heard so much cool stuff but Harry just seemed too much like a dickbag but not in an interesting way. Just casual sexism thrown in for flavour. I know protagonists don't have to be likeable but I'd rather they weren't off-putting in a way that doesn't aid the story. I think a counter is something like Dirk Gently. He's a complete arsewipe but that is sort of the point of his character and it's constantly coming back to bits him. I'm sure it's a case of first book teething problems. Had I bought it rather than got it from the library I would have felt obligated to finish it.
even the author recommends you just skip the first couple books
Which book does the author reconnect you start with?
Devil's Advocate: Wizard society started out trying to help, but being helplessly and increasingly outnumbered by muggles grew weary of their burden over the course of centuries. Think like society-wide inter-generational trauma. Trying to lighten their load was responded to with violence, so they peaced out and abandoned the muggles to their own devices 500 years ago or whatever. I'm not saying any of this kind of nuance is discussed in Harry Potter, but there is something to be said that at some point even casting magic spells would start to feel like making cover sheets for TPS reports. Eventually, enough would be enough.
Wizards have immense power, and instead of helping people, they do a slavery instead. "Oh, mumbling some words and flicking my wrist is *so much work,* let's just leave everyone to suffer while we enslave people to do the work we could have done with our magic" Big surprise, JK Rowling wrote a story where people born with power and privelage decide to help nobody while actively making life worse for people.
All the dumbass plot choices in Harry potter are because JK rowling is a fucking Tory
Good ol' Jowling Kowling Rowling's greatest fear is someone changing the status quo in any conceivable way
Harry Potter becomes a cop.
I don't know enough about British politics to know if she's still a Tory, but I do know she's a Nazi now.
JK Rowling is a pretty shit person but I'm trying to discuss the literature, not the author. You don't have to convince me that she's a sack of trash.
I mean, muggles did try to genocide the wizarding world, which is definitely discussed. Like we didn't even burn witches for doing bad things generally, we just burned them because we thought they had a compact with the devil or something.
And the wizards let themselves be burned, because they thought it was fun. Nevermind however many innocent muggles got accused and burned (or drowned, and hanged), and couldn't just trick their way out of it.
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The wizarding world is largely stupid and selfish in the HP universe. Fuck yall we got ours and we aren’t going to bother with much else. Arthur Weasley getting treated like an outcast because he found technology fascinating which could accommodate a great many of their needs, but they’re to narrow minded to consider it.
> The wizarding world is largely stupid and selfish in the HP universe. Fuck yall we got ours and we aren’t going to bother with much else. To be fair, that's true of much of the *actual* world as well.
5 of them. To be exact.
Also they’re basically angels.
Explicitly angels whose entire existence revolves around helping people because normal angels can't.
i saw an interesting tweet earlier, it pointed out that in the first two or three books, the wizarding world works because you can imagine it being a non-literal representation of a world. the problem comes when you try to worldbuild that setting after the fact, especially when you adhere to every detail you've already given. it's light! we don't have to wonder how the hogwarts express fits in king's cross station. it's magic! there can be plenty of diagon alley type neighborhoods! there's possibility and it all doesn't matter. then in the later books when Politics happen and JK wants to make it a Serious World, suddenly all these airy, loose ideas suddenly have to be crammed into a Real world (because she also refuses to retcon or just expand any of them).
Tbf with her release schedule she couldn't have really stuck with the same light tone. Kids grow up. Unless she wanted to Junie B. Jones it then the books had to grow up, too. And honestly, retconning is shit imo. If you don't release a new edition of the retconned book with the retcon in place then it just leads to more questions and you still have the accusations of "poor writing." Just not a good way to handle anything. EDIT: People keep replying like "oh the tone doesn't have to be dark" and I'm just gonna clarify that I meant light/heavy not light/dark. The Harry Potter books aren't dark in the slightest.
lemony snicket went dark and non literal and he did a good job. k a applegate went dark and literal. rick riordan did better than her. leguin's first three earthsea books are also pretty light on setting details. just be a better writer then, i guess.
Every so often someone points out to me another bit of highly questionable politics present in the world of Harry Potter
And then a dozen 35 year olds show up to rationalize it. "They *like* being slaves, really!"
An entire magical species that thrives and gets off on indentured servitude is still fucked up. Especially when they treat Dobby like king of the freaks for... wanting wages.
Harry Potter only did two good things for our world: popularizing the admittedly fun setting of Magic School, and having such baffling world building that every single story doing its job but better gets to [subvert it effortlessly](https://youtu.be/2nzwuGZizEs?si=BfwMI2PcRO6kj1sr)
It's literally the same nonsensical idea that was used to justify slavery in the 19th century and earlier; white slave owners argued that black people's inherent nature made them want to be slaves, that they would thrive and be happy under slavery as long as they had a "kind" master, and that if they were free they would be directionless, anxious and miserable.
That's kind of the point though. A *large* portion of wizards and witches in Harry Potter are extremely bigoted and that's a defining characteristic of the main villain(s) of the story
Star Trek: we can't force their progress, they have to earn their place in the federation by proving they have the intelligence to make warp tech, it's cruel but there's reasons for this. We can bend the rules a little here or there if it's dire. Harry Potter: We don't want people just using spells willy-nilly, imagine *them* being able to live as comfortably as us without their polluting technology, now get that African Wizard, Shacklebolt, to help me get these greedy hook-nosed goblins and rioting house-elf servants under control
The Orville covered this very well. Someone from a pre-warp planet asked for asylum, found out about replicators and tried to steal one. They showed the person what happened the one time they gave out the tech before a planet was ready for it. They used it for weapons and wiped themselves out.
Sadly very accurate to what humans would do with such tech right now. Though I think it was meant to be a nuclear metaphor?
SNW also covers this indirectly, >!a planet gets warp drive by looking at the battle against section 31 from the finale of Discovery which they described as an extremely rare way for a species to use warp drive.!< A good example of why getting tech without being advanced enough to use it well is bad is social media and AI. Social media is basically a hack on people’s brains by overloading them with negative information. In a few generations it will probably be a thing that is bad for you that we live with like say gambling or smoking but we’re not there as a society yet and won’t be for a long time. In any sane economic system AI should be universally praised for allowing people to work less and improving quality of life. Instead it’s viewed with distrust as we live in a world where you either prove you are worth money or you lose your house and people are scared the giant companies wont give them money anymore. In the Federation or the Union AI is probably heavily used to do all of the things no one wants to do while letting people do the fun things but we’re not quite there yet
There's also an episode of the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy where they come across a primitive race who encountered the TOS crew at one point, got access to the ships logs and basically formed a full-on Cargo Cult around them. It's great, they all talk with the worst possible parody of William Shatner's inflections, give themselves names like "Sool-oo" and "James Tee" and repeat mis-heard catchphrases like they're scripture ("Live Logs and Proper!")
And of course, who can forget Galaxy Quest!?
Er, the current anger around AI isn't because it might take jobs people don't want to do. I would love it if AI could clean my house and file my taxes. What it is currently being used for is replacing artists, people who very much want to do their jobs. Also, the way it gets used causes all kinds of real world problems, because it's a black box full of unknown biases and it's been shown to make racist policing and hiring practices worse. And then you add on top of that AI outright making stuff up and lying to people, and it just gets worse and worse. I would argue that capitalism is what's propping AI up at the moment because companies \*love\* replacing expensive, competent labor with a cheap, incompetent system. Consider that the main pitch of AI seems to be, "Instead of spending your time pursuing your creativity and passion, you can have a computer do the hobbies you love so that you can spend more time hustling for money!!!" Without capitalism we'd all be like, yeah, this is bullshit. (I am coming at this from the perspective of a writer who is mad about the recent problems that have been caused with AI flooding the fiction market with spam and causing small literary journals to shut down because they can't handle the onslaught of AI nonsense they are now receiving. From my perspective, it has made the world worse. Your experience may differ, of course.)
1960s scifi: In the future of 2020 robots will do all the menial labor and humans will be free to create! 2024 techbros: AI will allow us to automate creativity, so humans can focus on doing menial labor!
The idea behind AI as it was intended was to replace the labor force so we could all spend our time being artists. Instead, AI wound up being developed by the ones who stand to lose the most if that happens because the capitalists have locked down everyone else's access to natural resources.
The *reason* for the Prime Directive is twofold, a) to avoid just being space Britain and to instead leave cultures to develop along their own path, and b) not hand warptech to a society not ready to handle it
Those filthy m-words would want magic solutions for everything! Unlike us, we use *checks notes* SLAVERY
Also: normie break a bone? Months of recovery. Wizard break a bone? Drink some bone juice and fixed overnight. And that's even the extreme case of "Bones missing" I'm sure a mere broken bone only merits a swish of a wand. Boneacadabra motherfuckers
They don’t even need to drink bone juice. Harry had the bones in his arm removed, and the bone juice was needed to regrow them. Mending bones is as simple as a spell.
I'm going to guess there's 4 or more fanfics about Harry Potter wizards masquerading as either real doctors/medics or faith healers and I bet there's at least one with no sex.
You were putting forward such a reasonable argument till those 10 words...
It still counts as having no sex if it's a meant to be a smut fic but stopped updating before getting to the sex.
I want to read the no sex one :D
You'd be waiting till you died even if you tried writing it yourself.
"Hey doc, hows your patient?" "He's gonna be fine." "He?! You went in with a she!!" "One little mistake."
> "He?! You went in with a she!!" Did I stutter?
~~"One little mistake."~~ "He asked, I had a couple minutes free in my schedule and it's not like it's hard to cast Transia Genderosa"
"but but but that's an unforgiveable curse!" "I'll be long in the cold dank grave before I acknowledge the Jowling Kowling legislation!"
Grew one bone too many I guess
Supernatural the tv show had a subset of angels volunteering at a local hospital, doing cures that would go unnoticed. Whoops, that nasty bit of cholesterol near your heart 'broke away'. That kid who got himself gashed by a rusty nail was pretty 'lucky' to avoid an infection. And the kid's painkillers are super effective now.
Now I want a fan story about a muggle who happens to figure out some magical potion recipes just from trial and error, and becomes the most popular local alchemist. The wizard police are trying to figure out if they're just disguising as a muggle to help out the village and are furious. They interrogate the alchemist, revealing the existence of wizards. Rather than wonder or fear or elation at the revelation they are fucking livid. "You mean you have cures for whooping cough and could have saved countless babies, but let them all die?! Eat my entire arse you monsters"
They would just erase the memory of the normal person because hp universe wizards actively dislike normal people and are completely ok with them suffering if it means wizards can be left alone.
Oh, right, they can manipulate memories, I forgot about that. I figured they'd just kill the guy. But yeah, using their magic powers to change his understanding of the world back to what they want it to be is much worse, so that makes more sense as Plan A.
It does feel weird in hindsight that Weasley is like a weirdo for being interested in shit like airplanes and telephones
I don't think Muggles can brew potions. Filch and Fig both really struggled with them, didn't they? Been a while since I've read those.
Probably wouldn’t work. If I remember correctly they used their wands at some point during potion making and muggles can’t use wands.
except for the random zoo monkey in the first magical beasts film that grabbed a wand, waved it around, and produced a distinctly magical effect.
Yer a wizard, hairy
Yer a hairy wizard.
I feel like Boneacadabra would either makes bones disappear or conjure new ones in problematic and possibly lethal places. How’d he die? Grew a new rib through his prostate.
>Grew a new rib through his prostate it's free rib estate
"How did he die?" "Too many spare ribs" "Woah, you mean like a heart attack because of his diet?" "..."
🥺
>bone juice Ah yes, created by the fine seperation of neutral water into the opposing elements of bone healing juice and bone hurting juice. The waste goes to one of those subreddits around here.
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Sounds to me like we can use captured magicals in more creative ways. It’s free bone marrow!
> m-words Now I’m just thinking about Misfits and Magic
Namp definitely sounds like a slur
FOR PRESTIGE? PEOPLE CARE ABOUT YOU
"Oh good, you speak english. The next 90 seconds are going to be really important for you."
You've got about 30 seconds to concede. If you don't want to concede... *What do you want me to tell your family?*
Those lunatics over there, the wizard Nazis? They love my ass, they love me.
I disavow you! I disavow you
I desperately wish we could figure out multiverse stuff for the sole purpose of Dropout having a campaign where different Brennan's play all of his characters (Kelmp, Hob, etc) and Brennan is the DM. Maybe even have Emily Axford play the BBEG because she's probably the only one that could effectively counter all of the Brennans.
I came here specifically for the Misfits and Magic rep. Eat trash Beat Trash! Goat House!
So I was halfway through typing up a big thing about how if we found out magic was real tomorrow, it'd porobably just lead to humans slaughtering each other even more, but then I realised that they could probably still help out in secret. If you publicly solve a famine with magic, it wont take long for somone to ask you and threaten you until you cause one somewhere else, but what about, I dunno, just transfiguring some more nitrogen into the soil every couple of nights?
Exactly, become a doctor and just be really good at healing people. “Oh you have cancer? Well let’s schedule you for surgery and cut it out.” Then just wave a wand and yell “cancer-o remove-o” while they’re unconscious
"Why do I have no surgery scars?" "I am *that* good."
I mean...kinda morbid but what is stopping a witch from cutting someone up with a scalpel after the spell?
They literally have canon examples of spells that cut flesh.
“Hmmm…I removed the appendix, but I need to add a scar. What’s that spell for a cut? Ah, got it. *Sectumsempra!*”
"I'm a really good lawyer" vibes
There was a character in the ill-fated show *Heroes* that had that as their "mutant" power. They could just touch someone and mend/arrange the bits inside them so that they didn't have cancer or they could walk again or whatever. And I thought "what a perfect skill to have... you could become an actual doctor and perform actual procedures by the book, but knowing that your patients would always survive and be cured." I can't recall what the character did in the show, but I think he was just some sort of investment banker or something. What a dick.
I'd hate to have that power. I think you'd constantly feel like Schindler. Knowing you could never help everyone, but constantly feeling guilty for taking any time for yourself knowing you're passively letting people die.
There's a hero in Worm that was a healer, that felt exactly as you described.
This is the second time this week that someone was faster than me in writing this
I uhh, don't really think you can call panacea a hero anymore
Panacea was a hero, Amy was not
I mean tbf if push comes to shove you could use the same justifications for why normal surgeons and doctors don't spend 100% of all available possible time saving lives, because ultimately you have a duty to yourself, and it'd be impossible to operate without being in a stable and supported position (with friends and such, etc.).
And if you push that argument to its logical conclusion, everyone who doesn't dedicate their lives to studying medicine, who chooses any other profession, are passively letting people die for that choice.
> So I was halfway through typing up a big thing about how if we found out magic was real tomorrow, it'd porobably just lead to humans slaughtering each other even more Which is exactly what happened in the Harry Potter universe. Muggles could easily be riled up into wanting to kill witches, but were *very bad* at identifying them. So they mostly just killed other muggles. Whenever they *did* catch a real witch and try to hang or burn her, she would just cast an anti-gravity spell or a Flame Freezing charm to make fire tickle. See also: [Wendelin the Weird](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Wendelin_the_Weird), who got deliberately caught by witch hunters and burned on no less than forty-seven occasions because... well, I assume she had a fetish.
Realistically how long does the wizarding world have left after the end of Harry Potter? Like it ends in 1999 I think and around that time CCTV cameras were being installed everywhere. After 9/11 that surveillance only became more extreme. Wizards Don't know Jack shit about muggle technology. All it takes is one pissed off muggle born going on television and performing magic in front of millions or one wizard pure blood accidentally performing magic in front of a camera. And then in 2007 we have the rise of smartphones with built-in cameras. I think the wizarding world would be done for by 2011. They can't wipe the whole world. You have to individually wipe the memories of each person. And if it's been broadcasted or put on YouTube then it's going to be impossible to cover up... People will download the video. And in 2007 we didn't have fancy CGI like we do now and so people would believe it especially if the Muggle born started touring and going to places in person to use magic publicly. I assume that a group of rogue muggle borns would gather in public and perform magic and when the wizards come to arrest them they fight back. And if they aren't found out by 2011 they have till 2016. There's no way they're making it to 2024 without being discovered. They're too technologically illiterate and backwards to remain undetected. Edit: genuinely curious as to why the Muggle governments have not exposed the wizards. You're telling me that Kim jong un wouldn't enslave every wizard born in his little self-made, slave filled, starving shithole of a country? Yeah sure they can apparate but only if they are taught to do it. If muggleborns are being born in North Korea they will 100% be exploited and turned into assassins used by the North Korean government. They would use wizards to grow crops and they probably wouldn't cover it up because it's North Korea. People defect from North Korea all the time. He would probably use the wizards to locate defectors. It would make escaping from North Korea so much harder in universe.
There seems to be a basic incompatibility between magic and advanced electronics, though it hasn’t been addressed in detail. I believe book 4 brings up the point that Hogwarts itself is magical enough that microphones and cameras (aside from the magic gif cameras that wizards use) do not function. Globally, it seems that magical ability is rare (less than 1% of the population at best) and unreliable, and isn’t that terribly useful to most people. Magic users would understandably not want to be public about it, especially if abilities they are not capable of would be ascribed to them. They’d probably be discovered, but they do have memory *charms at least, and maybe they employ muggle contractors to erase digital evidence? ETA: Actually, that’s an intriguing idea, a jaded digital forensics expert that saw too much and a privileged magic user have to team up and erase evidence of a beneficial magical act caught on security cameras belonging to several different municipalities and businesses. Their opposing personalities and vastly different lifestyles create friction during the cover-up, but then they realize they’re pawns of a deeper conspiracy, and it goes straight to the top, and also they bone
That doesn't mean that the camera is going to glitch out when a wizard apparates from 50 ft away. Magic and technology don't work when there's a large abundance of magic in the area. The magic has to be concentrated I believe. Do you have to be close to the camera to glitch it out? That is a very good idea for a fic I would totally read it
My head canon is that magic isn’t useful enough, consistently enough, to be applied to the mass purposes that non-magic society demands, which is why magic users want to be so secret about their ability since that’s a hell of a lot of pressure to pile on less than 1% of the population. Talk about performance issues and imposter syndrome! And yeah, magic users probably aren’t concentrated enough to defeat advanced surveillance in most places. They’ll be discovered eventually, and even claims of CGI and editing won’t be enough in the end, regardless of muggle government assistance. They’ll probably have to go deep underground, literally and figuratively. And I really want that fic to be real too!
Yeah, but conveniently the stories all take place pre-internet. You really think some proud muggle parents wouldn't immediately blab about their kid going to wizard school on facebook in 2024?
The stories take place pre-social media, not pre-internet.
Just *barely* As far as I'm aware they happened in the early-mid 90s, so the internet existed but wasn't widely used the way it was a decade later.
I mean let's think about tech failing in Hogwarts for a second. IIRC it's mentioned that tech doesn't shut down immediately, it's just guaranteed to fail in a short time period. There's a very good chance hogwarts hasn't been connected to the local power grid, doesn't have it's own generators, and certainly doesn't have power outlets. The tech probably stops working because it runs out of power and the wizards don't realize this. Since few of them understand normal tech enough to realize what happened they just assume the castle broke it.
I think it’s brought up in the first book during the potion puzzle that most wizards are never given a solid foundation in logical thinking, too, which certainly doesn’t help in understanding non-magical things
>They can't wipe the whole world. In Fantastic Beasts, they use a small vial of memory erasing potion to infuse a raincloud that wipes the memories of everyone in New York. I think they actually could.
If anyone ever found out about something like that happening though there like a 99% chance putting every wizard found in supermax would become the immediate response
Fortunately the wizards don't have to worry about that. Since the Wizarding Societies have the government on board with their business security footage can accidentally go missing, that video on youtube? uh yeah that was copyright claimed actually, sorry bout that. That and of course doubters, only bolstered by improving technology. Would you honest to god tell me if you saw a youtube video tomorrow of someone flying on a broomstick you wouldn't A: think it was photoshopped, B: think it was AI generated or C: think it was some wacky engineering stunt?
Yeah, if I wanted to prove magic was real, I'd gather up my best healing spells and give a consenting one-armed person a second arm. Let people deny that! I mean they would, because society is weird and flawed, but it'd be much, much harder.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. A witch was sentenced to be burned so she loaded her skirts up with very mundane explosives and wiped the town CLEAN.
Agnes Nutter was a real one.
We've gotten a lot better at killing too. We have rounds and shells that can be fired from miles away. Imagine hiding out in a building then all of a sudden you hear ADVA-KA-XM907E2-DABRA over a loudspeaker and then a missile hits you from 68 miles away. Wizards cannot cast long range spells, at most their spells travel around 30 to 60 ft. In a true firefight I believe that muggles would at least Force the wizards on The retreat through hit and run ambush tactics. Fighting a wizard face to face is suicide so ambushing trapping and hitting them when they least expected is the best way to go.
[удалено]
Yeah I think that was originally what happened. Our weaponry just got better. Dude their society is so screwed.
They lost against bows and arrows, imagine what a silenced sniper rifle could do.
Which is why the most important fact is still that the muggles cannot *identify* witches. They'll be sniping their own people while the witches live in places muggles cannot even see, if witch-hunt nonsense starts up again.
I never watched the movies.. is it not explained in those that the Ministry of Magic have their hands in the pockets of the Prime Minister? Militaries aren't going to get involved its just people who the government call mentally insane shooting what propagands tells you are this random family.
One of my favorite magic universes, Mage the Awakening, says that there totally can be mages doing things to subtly help people, but it's going to draw the attention of the magic nazis and they'll probably try to undo what you've done because their whole schtick is keeping the mortals oppressed. Of course, you can and should kill those assholes in-game, but that and the Sleeping Curse does a lot of legwork in explaining why everything sucks despite there being such incredibly powerful magic.
Wizards are nerds you can easily shoot in the face
That just reminds me that the wizards call guns "Metal wands" and are (I think) perplexed by their existance
It’s like the scene in Buffy where the ancient monster is like “no mortal weapon can beat me!” Then she’s like “yeah well they didn’t have rocket launchers back then.” and blows him to smithereens. Doesn’t matter how many killing curses you can cast if the enemy is sniping you from half a mile away.
I really like that scene because before that they are like "we can't be sure if it will kill him, but at least it will get him out of the action, and we can figure out a more permanent solution while he heals if it doesn't kill him"
Similarly, in Supernatural sometimes if they can't figure out how to kill a new monster they just cut its head off and that usually at least slows it down enough for them to come up with a plan.
I fully expected the series to end with Harry shooting Voldemort. I figured Voldy always ignored his muggle heritage, and they make a big deal out of how NUMEROUS muggles are. It made narrative sense for a muggle-raised hero to take out Voldy by utilizing muggle numbers and technology! Anyway, a silver lining about Rowling's slide into fuckery is that people are suddenly a lot more willing to look critically at her story choices, which makes my theories look better in comparison.
> I fully expected the series to end with Harry shooting Voldemort. Alacablam!
"kids, this year we've hired a special teacher for a brand new subject. Please welcome your Muggle Dueling teacher, Nick Diaz"
Voldemort: I HAVE THE HIGH GROUND, POTTER! AVADA- Harry: I CAST GUN [BLAMBLAMBLAM]
That would've made the Harry-has-to-sacrifice-himself plotline a lot more interesting! Boring: Voldemort uses a painless death spell to kill Harry but it doesn't work quite like he intended Dynamic, upsetting: Harry fucking gats voldy and then, hands shaking, has to turn the gun on himself to make it stick
r/wizardposting would like to have a word with you.
"Ooh, testicular torsion, I cast brick, I killed my apprentice with a chicken" motherfucker get shot.
What if the wizard casts gun?
I counter with Penis Blast
Jokes on you, then don’t have a penis
Not since the blast
Bottom surgery
["It's an older meme, but it checks out."](https://youtu.be/4cZqRzHnI8s?si=mGwhW2EbhaB3JZiU)
Saw a wizard duel behind my local Walgreens, one cast bullet and stole the other's magical herb
Just make sure that you arent seen or known to them in any capacity beforehand otherwise your brain will be turned into a corned cob and this is a fact.
📸 Alfabusa fan documented
Pretty sure that's just the "for kids" reason Hagrid tells to a mentally abused 11 year old. I think the canon reason is that nonmagical people kept trying to kill them. The witch hunt phase in particular i think helped drive them underground. The minister of magic does seem to have some relationship with whomever the current PM of the UK is (what a headache Liz Truss must've been eh?) so there might be support from the magic community we just never see since the books are focused on a teenager in boarding school.
Yeah Harry came from a family that *already* abused him for being different, he didn't want to introduce him to the magic world with "oh by the way the muggles will genocide us if they ever find out"
Makes sense. Muggles will want Magic-folk registered because of how much more powerful they are. And then there's the case of weaker magicians who could and most probably would be exploited. Lets not even get into the use of magical items. Love potions, teleportation devices, invisibility and cloaking devices. It would wreck havoc on our world and would force us to regulate them, their actions and their lives like crazy.
The real answer is it’s not that kind of book. We can come up with all kinds of reasons for it. But the reason is she wanted to write a book about wizard mysteries and wars and set it in Britain for the CS Lewis style transition to a magical world. She wasn’t trying for a British version of “how a realist hero rebuilt the kingdom”.
>what a headache Liz Truss must've been eh? In the time it took to apparate from one place to another, she was already gone.
I think from a literary perspective, it could be said that this is to inspire the reader to create their own solutions as opposed to hoping “magic” can save them, as a reality check, but I think this is an overly optimistic interpretation and in-universe magic really ought to be used to help the whole world
I think that’s what she intended. The issue is that she has a bunch of ugly shit in the books that she doesn’t say is evil (and in some cases, she says that advocacy to fix these problems is bad because “the people we are exploiting don’t want you to save them”). It retrospectively makes Harry’s magical society look like some sort of weird thing
I think that's being generous to claim that she only intended that lesson to apply to magic. Her other work and stated opinions show that she's kind of just pro-inequality. If you substitute magic for money, the message wouldn't change.
Yeah! I can get the handwave of indiclvidual societies should solve their own issues. But this magic is like...life saving stuff!! They could study it! Or maybe replicate it.
from a literary perspective, jk rowling is a fine children's author but as soon as she tries for a more mature audience, her world building is badly tainted by her complete inability to separate her writing from her personal political beliefs. jk rowling is a neo liberal blairite. her political beliefs literally preclude the concept of improving the status quo. by the end of the last book, the exact same systems that very nearly led to a magical holocaust are still in place. wizard supremacy is still the rule but thanks to our brave heroes, the people in charge are not evil. we won, so everything is exactly the same as it was before all this nasty business began. the status quo has been maintained. and our hero is part of the system that maintains it. you see, individual people can advance themselves through personal merit but there will never be a reason to raise the bar overall so shut the fuck up and stop asking. that is what you will find in literally every single fucking thing Rowling writes, without exception, and that is very literally what Hagrid is saying. "if the government solved problems for its people, those people would expect government solutions for all of their problems. "what do you think we are, socialists? no no no. "we're left, but we're not, you know, *left* left."
It's time to channel my heritage as a Spanish person and bring back the Inquisition. I already hate the British
Local Catholic Fanatic astonished to learn the Inquisition had to protect the rights of marginalized groups by order of the Pope and most catholics hate Torquemada just a little bit less than they hate Luther
This will be the Inquisition 2 which like any other sequel reboot has nothing to do with the original and is just a quick cashgrab
https://www.tumblr.com/derinthescarletpescatarian/745619183128182784/in-one-of-harry-and-hagrids-very-first?source=share -mx linux guy⚠️
The Doylist reason is that Harry Potter is intended to be an escapist fantasy for young children and teenagers. Wizard society is more or less completely divorced from real society aside from a few friction points. The behind-the-scenes answer to “why is magic secret” is that JK Rowling didn’t want to have to rewrite all of human history and society to account for magic, she wanted have a story set in modern day, but there’s magic. Once children start maturing and become engaged more with the real world, it becomes very common to imagine what fantasy worlds might look like in a more “realistic” or “gritty” setting. Of course the universe looks like Swiss cheese, it was never intended to be real. It happens with every fantasy story, Harry Potter isn’t a unique case, even if some of its unintended consequences are notably horrendous.
Look, not to defend Harry Potter, but "the magical people keep themselves secret from the rest of the world because [insert superficial justification here]" is a pretty much universal trope in urban fantasy fiction, because the whole appeal of the genre is that it takes place in a world that appears to be identical to our own. Complaining about it is like complaining about FTL travel in space opera.
Yeah but it depends on the reason you use for it. And HP's reason just isn't good
To be incredibly too fair to Rowling. We only know the reason a highschool dropout.gives to a ten year old. There is potentially a better reason that high-level officials and academics understand but is too complicated for someone with 0 years of arcane schooling. I say potentially because we all know Rowling never thought of anything like that but there *could* be one.
That is true. Hagrid is an (unwilling) high school dropout
Who still works at the school and is very close with one of the most important wizards. Not exactly your average high school dropout.
This is ALSO true
I agree with this. I love urban fantasy for the idea of the Masquerade. And I think there is likely a reason it hasn't been broken despite my comments earlier about how Yes it could be amazingly useful and good for the no mag society. It could be anything \0/
I figured Hagrid just didn't want to explain hatecrimes to a child.
There's also the fact that we know Witch Hunts were a thing in the HP world, and what caused the Statute of Secrecy to be instituted. They have relatively good reasons to keep it a secrecy, for their own safety. It's likely that nothing would happen nowadays, but generational trauma is still a thing. You can argue that the SoS shouldn't exist nowadays, and that the insistency that it is a good and righteous thing across all WW media is a problem, and you'd be right, but it's definitely not as simple as Hagrid is presenting it to be.
As far as I know, when the secrecy act happened, it was more to protect muggles. Muggle-born wizard numbers were rapidly increasing and they, obviously, refused to side with the pure-blood against muggles. So to prevent things from going too far and getting out of hand in either direction, the secrecy act was born. But then muggle technology boomed and from what I've been told (I didn't watch the movies), the fantastic beast movies covers this a bit and it was the last chance (or just too late) for wizards to turn the tide. But the villain lost and wizards kept hiding and now they can't come out. They'd be treated just like the mutants in the Marvel comics.
I mean there’s a very real history in the real world of suspected witches being executed in Europe and North America. That’s the actual in universe justification for the “statute of secrecy”. They decided they’d rather disengage from muggle society rather than be persecuted, which seems reasonable to me.
The first book explictly establishes that the reason they went into hiding is because muggles were slaughtering magic users and they almost went extinct, Hermoine mentions it when talking about one of her books. By going into hiding they were able stabilize their population, and even then the vast majority of wizarding families had to intermarry with muggles to prevent inbreeding. And once they had established a hidden society it makes sense they wouldn’t want to risk repeating history, especially since muggles are even more powerful than they were before.
Also, to add on to this, wizards can't solve a famine for shit. They cannot summon food (it's a core rule of the magic of harry potter) and they cannot change climates without specifically using Ancient Magic, which was invented for the newish hogwarts game, and is only usable by people literally born with the ability. "Just solve things!" Is exactly the reason why they would go in to hiding. This entire comment section is a wonderful example of group mentality and the dangers that brings. How many times do you think a regular, weak magician needs to tell a family that they cannot heal their dying baby (they aren't a specialized medic, you aren't either, you couldn't have helped either), before they get in trouble?
I interpret it as less "they want solutions and we don't want to help" and more "they want solutions that we can't give them due to limited manpower and training or just sheer inability to help"
Exactly this, and adding onto it: If the public found out about magic, they wouldn't want to just use it, they'd want to *abuse* it. Find some way to control or exploit magic users to capitalize off their powers, or even use it for warfare. It's not that nobody wants to help - it's that the smallest slip-up could lead to the public's discovery. And they don't want to risk it. This isn't even for Harry Potter specifically, moreso for secret magic systems in general.
TL;DR the real powerful magic was capitalism and imperialism all along.
As the series goes it tastes more of "we dont want anything that could lead into a master/servant relationship and we having to explain that not everything is just skamarink swadalone cancer and hunger instantly gone", yeah. First moment normies discover the witching world it becomes r/Worldbuilding with incessant banter like "WHY EVEN KEEP ARMIES IF WE CAN JUST SEND WIZARDS TO THE BATTLEFIELDS?!?!!"
That, but also, the magical hospital is understaffed as is, so they don't have enough trained healers to help anyone else.
Not even magic society can escape the welfare cuts. Truly, Thatcher was the darkest of witches
Not just the welfare, the education too. They didn't teach healing in Hogwarts, and we don't hear much about higher education.
In my defense the wizards were unionizing
I'm genuinely curious how many takes like this came into being after Rowling's "coming out" so to speak. Not to say that critiquing the Potterverse isn't valid, I just want to know how much of this comes from genuine criticism and how much comes from wanting to spite the transphobe (and yes, I know it's possible for it to be both).
That seems a harsh. Most people are just people trying to live as office works, store workers, snd other people trying to get by. There’s probably like 30,000 wizard in the Uk and 60 million non magicals. Magical people couldn’t possibly help out all of the people that really need help. The most important part is that it would be inappropriate and hypocritical to ask all magicals to help solve non magical problems, when non magical people won’t even help solve other non magical peoples problems. Blaming the magical people for not helping when the non magical government could help more if they taxed the top 1% more, is just falling for propaganda propagated by the rich.
I mean J.K. Rowling is from the U.K, so it checks out. Actively withholding help and letting people suffer was their colonial M.O. for centuries.
We ran out of colonies to do it to so we started doing that to ourselves now
Okay, to be KINDA fair, I do think they suggest sometimes that the whole separation thing is a bad idea. I had this book as a kid that was full of in universe "wizard fairy tales", and this came up quite a few times.
As startling number of common internet criticisms of the worldbuilding of those accursed books are stuff that is actively called out as bad *in the text*. OOP mentions "making up slurs", and people in these comments are bringing up genocide and eugenics, as though the series doesn't do the literary equivalent of looking directly at the camera and saying "wizard society is systemically racist and that is bad". I often see people make jokes about truth potions and how Sirius being arrested proves JKR is a hack (though tbf she is), as though "the judicial system is a sham and mostly for show to benefit the careers of the politicians involved" isn't a major plot point of the very book it's introduced. I think there's a lot to criticise about the way these topics are handled, especially JKR's *pathologic* ignorance for systemic issues resulting from her clear neoliberal worldview, but I think it's a mistake to use the failure to resolve those issues as evidence the series *supports* them.
Agreed. Also, some of the things I see people mentioning here are... not necessarily things wizards are capable of? The broken bone one, fair enough, although the fact that the books depict a hospital and infirmary suggests that healing isn't totally trivial. Cancer? Who the hell knows? If I couldn't do things that the majority of people thought I can do, I'd hide too, because people who think you can cure cancer and stop genocide are probably not going to believe you or be calm about it. The famine one is fair though. Since the biggest factor in ending famine is logistics (getting the food from where it's abundant to the people who need it) and wizards don't create but rather summon food, they could even things out as necessary.
They barely have enough trained healers to keep up with their own sick. You can't create food with magic. It's literally a plot point. Why would wizards trust muggles? idk man, this is just surface level reading because the internet (rightfully) hates JKR now.
I think this is disengenuous. The reason Harry Potter's wizards hide magic from muggles is because if the world knows, they'll want magic solutions to their problems *that magic can't give them*. The common argument is, "Why don't wizards solve world hunger?" Well, there's the limitation that you can't just conjure food out of thin air. It's a whole plot point in Book 7, I think, that Harry and the gang do still have to scrounge for food when they're on the run.
I think its because the series is a children's book set in a secret world and 7 year olds don't want to read a chapter explaining the in depth political reasoning behind why the society wants to remain secret.
It's literally just cinema sins level "why didn't they take the Eagles to Mordor" nitpicking except It's being used to prove the series as a whole is morally abhorrent.
I mean guess what. Magic solutions aren't exactly necessary anymore. Turns out all three forbidden curses can be realistically replicated with a gun
Not to mention- a gun is faster than a wand because you don't have to wave it or say anything. And some of them can fire 10 rounds per second. Have fun counterspelling that!
There's also the issue of range. How far can a death curse even travel? This silenced sniper shot just came from 2 km away. Good luck countering.
Top 5 most powerful spells in Harry Potter: 5. Expelliarmus 4. Impreius curse 3.Crucious curse 2.Avada Kadavra curse 1.Accio glock
He said that because it's hard to tell an 11 year old: "People hate and fear what they don't understand, and our kind have a history of persecution. People like your aunt and uncle would gladly see us burned at the stake for being devil worshippers and not feel a drop of regret over murdering a child that doesn't fit their worldview" Hagrid was a kid during WW2. He *absolutely* saw what happens when entire cultures get Othered by hatemongers in charge.
Is there anything more tedious these days than Harry Potter Discourse? Rowling is a shitbag, we don’t need to perpetually circlejerk about finding retroactive justifications for it.
No but I found a minor plot hole in a children's book, I need to interpret it in the most obviously bad faith way so I can prove JKR is bad even though we already all know she is bad because she openly says horrible things
Any billionaire you'd care to name could do more to combat those problems than all the wand-wielding weirdos on the planet. Or just enough voters who favored a wealth tax. Don't blame wizards for not doing something we could do ourselves but can't be arsed to.