A lot of people point out that it doesn’t make any sense that Harry and Ron didn’t like their schoolwork. Well I figured out why:
It’s because the magic system is just as boring in-universe as out of universe. It doesn’t make any sense in universe either. Harry and Ron realised Rowling’s magic system kinda stinks way before we did, because they spent all day learning it.
If Sanderson had been writing Harry Potter, then Harry and Ron would have liked learning magic as much as Hermione did (Also, Sanderson actually DID write a book about a super-school, it’s called Skyward, it’s good)
It’s also not surprising the conservative rat hates history even though it should be one of the most important subject when dealing with the setting’s hitler.
Eh, it’s a good shower thought.
But I have to disagree overall. Both of them showed interest in various subjects; Harry more than Ron.
But, I think you’re right that the magic system is boring. It’s memorizing fiddly combinations of words and movements.
Rowling didn’t really set out to write a magic series. She was writing a boarding school series with a magical background, so she never did any proper world building. What little there is came well after the movies exploded, and is largely cobbled together.
While not as well written, it has much closer ties to things like the Chronicle of Narnia than something like Sanderson’s stuff. The magic is fluff, technobabble, not what the series is actually about.
If there had been sections set in muggle schools, Harry and Ron would have been roughly the same. Harry likely would have been interested in some subjects, but distracted by the real story, while Ron would have been kind of drifting along, getting by grade wise without being interested. Ron might have been semi into soccer, but have been whining about it not being as good as quiddich.
I would also argue that if Sanderson, or a similarly world building capable author, had taken on the story, there still would have been a gradation in the trio’s academic focus. You take three kid characters and have them being exactly the same about something like that, it won’t work; you’d end up having to completely hand wave it with references to them being great students because it’s more boring to have them all be the same level of interest in any given thing.
Even among real world scholarly sorts, the levels of interest in a given subject aren’t going to be exactly the same, and a lot of those kids tend to start their friendships because of the “nerd” factor. The HP trio became friends partially by accident, but stayed friends as they grew together and shared experiences, so the dynamics just aren’t the same.
Even the last three books, where it seems like there’s discovery of an underlying system to the magic, the deathly hallows are a mcguffin, not a genuine world building tool.
So, I get where you’re coming from, and agree that she did a pretty crappy job of making a coherent magic system. But it didn’t really need one, it just needed silly phrases for kids to geek out over, and that she did very well
In Sanderson’s super school book, there are 10 kids and only one of them is uninterested in piloting spacefighters. But he is interested in engineering, so he’s still able to be a big nerd about the book’s subject matter. Everyone else is either a great pilot who likes piloting, or fucking dies in a tragic scheme emphasising the brutality and pointlessness of war.
Sanderson doesn’t write characters who just drift along without an interest in anything, because Sanderson writes books about topics that he makes interesting.
Rowling is only able to create characters who think Divination or History of Magic are boring, because she makes them boring. Sometimes on purpose!
Rowling was writing about grade school kids going to school. Grade school kids get bored at school. If they live in a world where everyone uses magic and it’s not that special they’re going to get bored of learning about magic sometimes. It’s like if in grade school our teachers spent a bunch of time teaching us how to use computers, phones, and other technological devices. Sometimes it would be cool and interesting and a lot of the time it would be pretty damn boring.
Plus Rowling wanted the grade school kids reading her books to relate to her characters, so she gave her characters a schooling experience they could relate to. And as much as I hate Rowling, there’s something inherently kind of comedic about a bunch of kids being bored silly learning about magic because it’s something that seems like it should be exciting to us, the reader.
The boredom of the characters isn’t a failure of the writing or magic system, it works perfectly well for its intended effect.
Rowling is a fucking idiot.
Damn, you must take some pretty long showers!
I mean, it isnt quite juvenile fiction, but it’s a series of books about kids. Having the magic system being simple makes sense.
Harry Potter’s magic system isn’t simple.
Agree to disagree.
I like how Patrick Rothfuss wrote about “magic” in his Kingkiller Chronicle… I think it was explicitly called something else (been years since I read the books), but it was pretty fucking cool.
It was like daoist in nature almost, if I remember correctly.
Even AHS Coven had more interesting magic than Hairy Pooper
Who sanderson
Brandon. Look up Mistborn. Steelheart and The Stormlight Archives are good too.
thank 💖
Tress and the emerald sea is a good starter. It’s in the cosmere, but it’s shorter and kind of gives a feel.
This is the one thing I really appreciated about the Discworld books on a recent re-read. The wizards are hilariously incapable of doing anything useful. Terry Pratchett doesn’t give a super clear series of rules for the magic system but it’s abundantly clear that the wizards are incapable of actually useful magic, and mostly just get too tired up in internal power struggles to ever do anything. And in the book Sourcery, the first sourcerer (one who can create new spells) to grace the disc takes over the world, realizes running the entire world is too stressful and tedious then creates his own pocket dimension to play with magic in instead (I’m oversimplifiing here, skipping over a bunch of interpersonal stuff related to a sentient wizard’s staff run by a dead guy who tricked Death among other details but that’s the general gist)
I don’t know about that. They literally introduced time travel and then never bring it up again except for one sentence where “oh they all broke”.
Like don’t get me wrong it’s not horrible but it’s also not great. It is good enough for a kids story which is what it is, not something to build your life off of
I think you might have responded to the wrong comment?
Yup looks like it. Stupid app lol
Rincewind isn’t useless at most things, he’s only useless at magic.
Esk is actually able to use magic to solve problems, because she’s a precocious child and also female.
There’s was almost no magic!
Magic systems are not about what is possible, but the limitations.
Probably because its a shitty TERF series. Read better books, watch better movies.
There’s nothing wrong with the magic system because there’s always a reasonable setup and payoff for what can be done with magic and solutions never come out of nowhere as some deus ex machina. The magic system the stories had worked perfectly fine for the stories that were being told. Not every magic system has to be some stupid overly explained BS that takes all of the actual wonder and “magic” out of it.
Rowling is a piece of shit terf but you Sanderson cultists are still so fucking annoying. There’s more to magic in storytelling than just the exact, specific mechanics of how it works. Read Earthsea.
She introduces time travel out of freaking nowhere.
She hints at it throughout the whole book/movie by showing that Hermione had a chronologically impossible course load and having her suddenly show up in places that she didn’t seem to be mere seconds previous.
For one book.
Yeah. I don’t think you understand what a deus ex machina is.
Some hints don’t change all the nonsense plot holes and the fact that is almost entirely forgotten about afterwards. It’s only there because the plot needs it.
Of course it was only in the story because the plot needed it! Most things are only in a story because the plot needs it! And there was plenty of setup for it beforehand–an entire book’s worth in fact.
The fact that it was introduced and then never used again even though it is obviously unbelievably useful and apparently available enough that a 13 year old was lent one to attend extra classes definitely deserves some criticism but at some point you kinda just have to make peace with the fact that it’s a kid’s book and it’s really not that big of a deal.
You’re really doing nothing to dispel (no pun intended) my suspicions that Sanderson readers can’t understand anything that isn’t explicitly explained to them.
I’m sorry, no Deus ex machina? Am I misremembering the bit where suddenly two wizards casting a spell at each other at the same time for a prolonged duration reverses cause and effect and makes dead people come back as ghosts to give the protagonist advice?
I can agree that stories don’t need a “good” magic system, but I also feel like HP has glaring holes in places that negatively affect the experience. It’s still a fun story, but I definitely think it could be better if the magic made more sense.
Ok the ghosts coming out of the wands thing kinda came out of nowhere, but all they did was tell Harry to run away. It’s not like they had a massive impact on the fight.
Pretty sure the reasoning behind that was given in book 1.
I don’t think so, I believe the reasoning only showed up shortly after the event, though it’s been a really long time since I’ve read HP, I’d be interested in knowing if I’m wrong
I’m pretty sure Olivander already mentions when Harry chooses his wand that it’s basically a twin of Voldemort’s, and in the subsequent books it’s explained that that + Lily’s magic is causing plenty of weird things to happen, including what happens in book 4. Sure, the exact reason why it happens is still “magic” but that goes for most magic systems if you delve deep enough.
The issue is that the wands being made from the same core doesn’t have any explained effect before this event, when an explanation conveniently appears, now being a known event that has happened before. The issue is that, to my knowledge, things just happen that have no prior explanation, which sugests they’re just being made up on the fly to fit the narrative, which in turn means the reader/viewer has no way to anticipate them.
In what I’d consider a “good” magic system, things fit together. They don’t have to be revealed immediately, but often there will be hints, and when the reveal is made it’s gonna at least fit into the void in prior knowledge. This is, of course, my subjective preference, but I think HP goes so far into the opposite that it’s just random stuff made up to justify whatever the author wanted to happen with no reasonable explanation.
But isn’t that part of making the reader explore and experience the world of magic, just like Harry is? There’s no narrator here who already knows everything, you’re experiencing the stories through the eyes of Harry, and only really know what he knows. In that context, it doesn’t really make sense to have these early clues. The reader can’t anticipate everything because Harry can’t either.
Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.
One of the two wizards WAS the protagonist, so you might as well call this a near death experience or something. Might literally have all been in his head. I don’t think this is a good example.
I looked it up and found the name - pretty sure it was explained shortly after the event as “Priori Incantatem”, showing it’s a known phenomenon in the world.
Expecto patronum, et voila, deus ex machina.
They set it up at the beginning of the movie? How is that a deus ex machina?
Picking on Sanderson is a bold move ;)
The main point of the contrast being Sanderson (and honestly, most of the greats) developed a solid cohesive lore and set of rules. As the story progressed, the rules get clarified, the twists and surprise are made in logic and creativity, but in the finding of some new rules and the hasty trying to stitch them back into the past.
Sanderson puts out as much content in a couple of years as others do in decades. It’s not always page-turners, but each work has it’s moments.
Rowling did a little worldbuilding, maybe borrowed a bit, arguably did a good job on a handful or two of characters then just kinda milked it.
She made Hermione after herself. She needed the boys to be bad at magic or Hermione couldn’t save them. If they were bad because magic was that hard, that would make her a genius, which wasn’t what she was going for. The magical system was lame and the boys were bad at it because they were just unobservant undriven “boys”. It’s likely a combination of her worldview she’s painting and trying to set the stage that magic is everywhere and all around us and everybody can do it but they don’t just know exactly how.
Magic is that hard, but being a genius doesn’t make you good at it. Rote memorisation makes you good at it. Hermione isn’t a genius, she enjoys rote learning. Harry and Ron crave stimulation, and there’s none to be found in Rowling’s magic system. Rowling might have intended magic to be easy, but she made a mistake. Rowling enjoys rote memorisation, so it’s easy for her and her self insert, but not for normal people who want to be intellectually stimulated. Rowling accidentally made magic hard, and the story makes more sense with her mistake in it.
Harry doesn’t need to study or practice because, by accident of birth and circumstance, he’s naturally gifted at magic. Hermione isn’t naturally as gifted, but with hard work and dedication, she can do it all. Ron is neither, so he’s just the fuck up.
Nah, the magic system is fine, they just didn’t use it right. Example: Snape wondering if somebody is there. “Accio Invisibility cloak!” Boom, Harry’s standing there visible and Snape has his cloak!
A magic cloak that can hide from Death can probably hide from Accio, too.
It says a lot about Rowling that Hermionesl’s one flaw was being an abolitionist
It’s literally just memorizing bad latin, of course they were bored. There was no spiritual aspect to it at all
