Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.
There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”
It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.
It’s also a bit odd that the spell so dangerous it was the absolute peak of the Dark Arts was a spell that just killed one person, and not even reliably. Where are the spells to call down meteors and cause earthquakes?
Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no challenge to it.
Rowling took “a wizard did it” as far as it can go.
It being based off of public schools is a bit odd given that Hogwarts is a boarding school.
That’s just the name.
In the UK, “public school” just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They’re still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
Huh I was not aware of that. Very different from how that term is used in the US.
Yeah. It confused me at first too.
It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.
It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”
I’m not much of a harry potter fan but wasn’t that the whole point of being in hiding
They were being killed by muggles left and right, and this was way before the invention of guns, so, yeah, they weren’t winning that war in any case.
Actually, at some point in the books they talk about this, and somebody comments how Muggles seldom would actually catch a real witch or wizard. And if they did, the witch or wizard would cast a spell to shield themselves from the fire and pretend to be in pain.
I had trouble believing Harry Potter as a kid. The whole house elf thing seemed unrealistic. Then when I grew up, I realised English people really are that racist.
I remember seeing a meme of Harry Potter, but I can’t find it anymore. Basically a conversation between Harry and dumbledore.
Harry says to dumbledore:
We are wizards, we could cure cancer. Fix world hunger and end all wars. Why we don’t do it?
Dumbledore says:
Harry you forgot the most important reason: we are British
Found it - https://existentialcomics.com/comic/391
My father grew up poor in the East End of London and got a scholarship to go to the sort of upper-class school that Hogwarts emulates. Apart from being proud of the achievement of doing so well academically there, he had very little good to say about it, especially the upper-class snobbery and, yes, the bigotry (he was Jewish) from both the students and the teachers. He told me that every morning just before school prayers, the headmaster made a big deal about excusing all the “Jews, Catholics and other heathens” (or something to that effect) to humiliate all of those kids. One of his only friends at the time was another kid there on scholarship.
Ironically, he said his favorite teacher at the school was the school’s chaplain, who was a really kind and funny man that didn’t care that my father wasn’t an Anglican, just that he was a smart kid.
My wife loves Harry Potter but I could never get into it after hearing all of my dad’s stories about his school when he was growing up.
Can you please stop stalking and harassing me?
I was agreeing with you. I don’t even know who you are.
At first I figured this was a joke about “flyingsquid be everwar, der” but… Maybe you had a nasty argument with this person in the past, and you don’t remember them, but because you are one of the more prominent lemmy users, they will always know who you are?
Stay away from me.
I hope the bug with your block button gets resolved.
You can block users.
Imagine the IRA, except they can fly, go invisible, or simply step into a phone booth or fireplace and vanish, and had an entire other dimension they could disappear into where they could be self sufficient.
Technology means nothing if you don’t even know who you enemy is.
If wizards were incapable of shielding against fast moving projectiles, they would have more spells dedicated to creating fast moving projectiles against their opponents.
I think part of the subtext of the wizarding world is its parallels to British sensibility. You do things the way they’ve always been done because that’s just the way of it. You don’t come up with new spells, you rely on the tried and true spells that have been around for centuries.
Absolutely every genius or inventor is tarred with the crazy eccentric brush
This is explored at length in the books. The wizard supremacists are an allegory for race supremacists, and it’s pointed out repeatedly that they’re delusional, broadly impotent, and small-minded. The death eaters believe so completely in their godhead and his divine right to rule that they neglect to consider even the most basic countermeasures or alternatives. There’s some “death of Stalin” paranoia but it’s overwhelmingly unforced incompetence.
Voldemort, likewise, blocks out even the potential for his lessers to outdo him. He is utterly infallible and his insecurities as an incest orphan to a fallen house will not allow him to feel any differently. Meanwhile, he’s been repeatedly circumvented and beaten by a group of teenagers, and his brewing plans will lead to the complete genocide of wizardkind upon reaching the world stage. It perfectly encapsulates the way race supremacists view the world and why they fail so frequently. The enemy is both strong and weak.
Darn shame rowling’s turned into what she hates. She wasn’t terrible at writing populism 101.
She just wrote what she actually believes and it ended up being biting satire by accident.
Fun fact: Rowling thinks Lolita is a beautiful and tragic love story
If wizard supremacists are an allegory for white supremacists, are normal wizards normal white people and muggles “people of color”?
That’s one interpretation, absolutely. Or you could say Han Chinese, racist Han Chinese, and Uighurs. Or Israelis, racist israelis, and Gazans. Or white Americans, white American racists, and native Americans. Or white Brits/Irish, straight/gay, seafaring Scandinavians/prey, etc…
In group vs out group, with perceived genetic/social differences.
As nonsensical as it is, giving the limit of the suspension of believe necessary to keep the world reasonably coherent, the wizard world has a solid grasp on the non-magical world while it’s a given (literally a given, it makes no sense otherwise) that the people from the normal world have no idea magic exists, other than what is leaked and relegated to fairy tales (it’s our world).
Wizards, their institution and governments, their own citizen are aware of what weapons are. Harry himself of course knows what a gun is and could potentially grab a number of them to prepare for war.
So it’s an implied obvious implicit answer that even a limited mastery of magic vastly overpowers weapons. Which is obvious if you consider that in the magical world they are aware of the “laws” of physics AND the extra laws of magic.
They just know more about how the world works, how to inflict death and how to protect against harm.
But IIRC that is never implied in the books and it is shown a couple of times that they know very little about technology and being very surprised by stuff like television. Which is very weird given that a non insignificant part of the wizards are from muggle families and lives among muggles.
Whilst I loved the books, as I read I always had this question in my mind about what if the wizards approached magic with a more scientific method and if they integrated with the scientific advancements of the human world.
Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, though they do kinda turn him into a demigod
Yeah, though it’s not the best of movies, Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice did a really good job of treating that barrier between science and magic with a degree of reason and accountability. And in my own head canon those ideas are part of the Harry Potter universe and it’s magic.
I mean they don’t really get taught anything about the outside world. I don’t remember seeing physics or social studies or any other “normal” class on Harry Potter’s class list.
My understanding is that they used wards to prevent technology from working near them.
So in your “canon” no mage ever asks itself why rocks fall to the ground?
I mean it’s a possible angle, overreliance on rituals and magic that sapped those people of any critical approach to reality…
I mean it took them forever to get indoor plumbing. The Romans had indoor plumbing.
Harry Potter wizards use magic instead of technology, they don’t really seem to be interested in using both together. So I believe that they don’t go out of their way to understand technology or the physics behind it.
Many magical things defy physics in that world. I think wizards in that universe see science as an obstacle and not a valuable method for understanding reality. Because their reality defies understanding by scientific process. It’s all ritual based. The pronunciation of a spell changes its effect.
It’s not a lack of critical thinking that makes them avoid science. It’s the fact that what they do is more immediately effective than science.
Their reality doesn’t defy understanding by the scientific process. It has reliable, repeatable results, and therefore can be studied and empirically catalogued. The only way something could not be studied by science is if it’s totally random, if actions do not correlate, even slightly, with results. Of course, such behavior would make it completely useless as a tool, because one could never get desired results from it. Magic in the setting is very reliable and repatable, and as long as you do it right, results can be studied, so it’s easily catalogued by the scientific method.
Science as a methodology began developing in the real world during the renaissance. Prior to that people had methodologies that provided moderately accurate models of reality but often included superstition, unsupported metaphysics, or religious dogmas. These other inclusions are what we call magic: Alchemy, astrology, geomancy, thaumatergy etc.
Assuming Harry Potter’s world developed similarly to ours, the muggles would have taken a scientific view of reality beginning around the 1500s. But magic was real and wizards kept their magical methodology and metaphysics.
They clearly have learned a lot about magic because they no longer call on demons or need the moon to be in a particular phase, but they aren’t using the scientific method to do that.
Harry Potter and the poorly-constructed magic ruleset.
Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Sound
I personally think it depends on exactly what the limits of Magic are - it could be anything from Muggles eradicating Wizards, to the opposite, all very plausibly. To me, it comes down to the power of modern surveillance vs. the power of notice-me-not + space-expansion + anti-detection spells. Plus there’s a whole bunch of other powerful spells and devices (time turners, for example), but the muggles have a while fuckton of gold and other valuables to recruit these capabilities to their side as well.
I would also consider the logistics of war. There’s a military saying: novices study tactics, experts study logistics.
How long would it take to train a wizard to get to that level vs. a muggle with a gun? It feels like the classic knight vs. armed peasant situation.
That plus being able to cut off food supplies or infrastructure- just saying the US military was able to take out sadams military capabilities faster than he could react.
But the inverse also applies - there’s not much stopping wizards from portkeying/apparating into the Oval Office or the pentagon and magibombing them, or Avada-ing key targets. Wizards are probably the worst kind of guerrilla fighters - ones unchecked by range. And as far as food is concerned, food multiplication is a thing. I personally believe that in the long term, the way muggles would win would be through subverting wizards, not by pure overwhelming force.
Well, I cannot imagine wizard dieing to a nuke. You would have to surprise them I suppose. I mean, what if they teleport the nuke to some other place?
Even if all the tech kept working, I imagine the only way you could beat a wizard as a Muggle is if they don’t see it coming.
If they see a gun, sure, the first wizard may be surprised and die, but it will not take long to find a spell that shields them. Rockets? Same story. Sure you can destroy stuff, even kill a bunch. The rest will be back though, and they can teleport, change memories, actually turn into another person or animal, turn you into an animal and whatever else.
The one plot hole in HP that always annoyed me is how Avada Kedavra is supposed to be the worst spell. In the books it is mentioned how Peter Pippeling blew up a whole street with a bunch of muggles in it. That seems way more dangerous…
It comes down to how powerful static wards are, and how much technology just gets corrupted by magic. The real power of the wizards is memory and time manipulation. Close range is definitely in favor of wizards, you can’t surprise them unless they are intentionally careless. They can always go back a few hours and ambush you back. Chaos would ensue if they deleted every memory before 5 of a handful of leaders.
The tech killing thing is poorly defined, but hogwarts seems to disable electronic devices within a radius. If it’s similar to an emp, it may have countermeasures, but it’s hard to say they also work on magic. Operating within the radius of somewhere like that would be difficult.
There’s also the animagus issue. Every dog, cat, bird, or bug is a potential spy or assassin that is practically undetectable.
The big question is can spells stop a large bomb/nuke. Even if they couldn’t, it would be possible for wizards to escape the blast zone pretty easily, unless they couldn’t detect the attack.
I think the big weakness would be sniper fire that may be fast enough to prevent reactions at the borders of wards.
Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.
“modern technology just doesn’t work”
I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It’s surprising to me that “and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology” is where you would decide to roll your eyes.
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It’s the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.
Harry potter isn’t the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don’t have limits or an idea of what’s dangerous/important
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will?
Sometimes the answer could be “hey, we don’t know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn’t there yet.”
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well.
But maybe it doesn’t matter to the story. HP isn’t a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There’s all kinds of things we didn’t and/or don’t fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the “rules” of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don’t see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It’s not that sort of magic - I’d call it a “soft-ish” magic system if we’re going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.
I get your points, I’m not trying to say you are wrong, I’m just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn’t the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.
Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that’s a matter of personal preference, not “correctness” if that makes any sense.
Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren’t directly related to her story.
I think the guns would help against wizards as much as they help against oppression. They are a helpful tool, for sure, but the ability to communicate and form plans is massively superior. And wizards, like modern tech giants, can impede that.
Loved it. Way better than the original.
I cast ICBM
