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Comment on Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell

I love Brandon Sanderson, but his world building and complex magic systems aren’t for most people. I’ve tried to get my wife to read his stuff for years and she just has never gotten into it.

The reason Harry Potter was so commercially successful is because the vast majority of the public doesn’t want to learn about allomantic properties of 16 different metals and how they have internal/external, physical/mental, enhancement/temporal and pushing/pulling effects.

They don’t want to learn about adhesion, gravitation, division, abrasion, progression, illumination, transformation, cohesion, and tension surges - and how bonding a spren through oathes increases your ability to surgebind. Their eyes glaze over when talking about the cognitive and physical realms.

Most people just want to hear "yeah some people are magic and can wave wands, say some magic words and poof magic happens. That’s why it’s one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

But yeah, I’ve just learned to accept that while I love some Sanderson magic systems, it’s not ever gonna be for everyone. And that’s ok.

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Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Not only that, he struggles with any kind of romantic relationship writing. My wife also tried to read mistborn but kind of lost her shit when the only thing described was a short kiss across all that time.

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Muaddib@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Well, the needs of a fiction reader and the needs of a character in the world are different. Harry actually needed to learn magic. And there’s no logic to it, so all he could do was rote memorisation. He would have been happier with a magic system that makes sense.

Hermione is supposed to be a genius nerd, and yet she does far less in 7 books to actually study her magic system, than Vin has done by the start of the second book. Vin isn’t a nerd or a genius, she’s just a capable hero living in a world where magic makes sense, so she’s better at studying than Hermione. Hermione gets 8 hours to do it a day for 6 years and still can’t compete with Vin.

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- Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  What is this post even? One of the main plot points of one of the books was about how the students are so engaged that they made an underground secret class to study and learn.
  
  Harry literally stays up all night studying his books during summer break in the earlier years, the book describes how it’s all he can think about. (before schooling became a lower priority due to the active war).
  
  There are always going to be boring classes, and the book describes that even Hermione is bored in some of them, but typically the students are always engaged, it’s clear that Hermione is a hard worker with doctor parents that expect a lot from her, not that she is some hyper genius.
  
  Harry is a rich jock and a literal child, he is the common trope of the school athlete that slacks in classes occasionally and likes trouble making.
  
  I think it’s very clear that the students were generally engaged in engaging classes with good teachers (hagrids classes, PE / flying, defense against the dark arts, the gardening class with the screaming plants), disengaged in classes that would have equivalent perceptions of boringness (history of magic).
  
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