Nothing memorable enough to mention.
Comment on Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 3 days ago
What’s boring about the magic system in Harry Potter? Can you give specific examples?
Arbiter@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Brandon Sanderson is the best magic system writer in the world, and these are his “laws of magic” for creating an interesting magic system:
Rowling never follows these principles. The reader doesn’t understand the magic, magic is rarely given sensical limitations we understand, and Rowling always adds new stuff instead of explaining what we already have.
I posit that the answers to all these questions I listed just don’t exist. There is no explanation. Hermione does well in school because she rote memorises. Harry and Ron can’t engage with the material in their homework because they don’t understand it because nobody does.
What Harry Potter’s magic system, insofar as it exists, does do well, is vibes. It feels like a wondrous magic system. That’s what sold books. Harry likes all the vibes stuff in the books, like the spooky castle, fighting evil, being a strong wizard. He doesn’t understand any of the magical theory, because it doesn’t exist.
shneancy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Harry Potter has a soft magic system - a system where pretty much everything can be explained by “a wizard did it”, they’re mystic and lawless (see also Lord of the Rings)
it seems you enjoy more hard magic systems like you described above, where the rules are explained, and you can more or less understand why things work the way they do (see also Earthsea by U.K. Le Guin or ATLA)
the hard/soft scale is not perfect, but it gives you a rough gist of what to expect
writers aren’t limited to just one either! Percy Jackson has a soft magic system, a lot of “a
wizardgod did it!”, where Kane Chronicles has a strict magic system bound by understandable rules (with only gods and divine interventions going above the rules)Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
No, I like soft magic systems when they’re good. Take Star Wars. It’s so soft. It’s so soft that when GL introduced midichlorians to try and make it hard, everyone hated it.
The Force is good because it represents a certain philosophy. It’s basically the Tao. Everything the Force can do is thematically appropriate and serves to teach us the philosophies of the Jedi, the Sith, and the other force users. The light side is harmony and believing in yourself. The dark side is domination and corruption. All the force powers support these themes and illustrate the force users embodying their philosophical beliefs in the world. Obi-Wan uses mind tricks because he believes in nonviolent misdirection. Palpatine uses lightning because he believes in ultimate power.
Rowling’s magic system means… Magic. It’s there to convince us that this fantasy world is magic. The Force can break Sanderson’s laws because ot means something more than just magic. It’s philosophically consistent, and that’s more important than being internally consistent. Rowling’s magic only relates to Rowling’s magic, so it needs to be internally consistent to work. And it isn’t, so it doesn’t.
shneancy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
yeah that’s fair. don’t get me wrong i wasn’t trying to convince you to like Harry Potter’s magic system, but you quoted “lack of rules” as a something you disliked about it so i gave a short explanation as to why that specific thing isn’t what makes HP’s magic feel shallow
guy@piefed.social 3 days ago
teft@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Do terrestrial wizards have midichlorians like space wizards do?
Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
You know what? Rowling did actually follow Sanderson’s laws with one specific bit of magic. The time turner. The time turner has a very simple limitation: you cannot change the past. But, you can do things in the past that don’t change what you experienced the first time. We understand how the time turner works, and Rowling comes up with a clever way to make it work, which makes sense to us. That’s the second and first law! The time turner is well written!
And then she broke the third rule. She didn’t expand on it, she added something new in book 4 instead. So people asked “what about the time turner”, and in the next book she got mad and destroyed them all so she’d never be asked “what about the time turner” again.
Rowling wrote something really interesting that actually makes sense. And then decided she didn’t want it in her story anymore. Because Rowling doesn’t actually like writing interesting magic. And that’s why Harry and Ron aren’t very interested in magic. Rowling was never able to write a scene where a character actually geeks out about how magic works, because she doesn’t care how it works. She’s not interested.
theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Sanderson is such a beast, everything he has written that I’ve read is solid gold!
bufalo1973@lemm.ee 2 days ago
I though some years ago that’d a funny take on magic would be having a world with magic, wizards, witches, dragons, … and after building that world comes an spaceship and some people jumps out and says that magic is just the tech they left behind millennia ago.
Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
That’s the backstory of Gloryhammer