#harry potter magic system

[herbologyprofessor]

my collected thoughts on the magic system of harry potter and what I would change to make it better.

i think that the harry potter magic system sucks!!

i mean, im sure this isnt a hot take but like...how is it that students at hogwarts school of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY graduate knowing how to use maybe a handfull of spells in combat? and they're the same spells that all the aurors and all the older members of the order and all the death eaters and even voldemort use?

and im especially talking about how weak it makes people who are supposed to be really powerful and dangerous seem. including the titular character Harry Potter himself. Harry uses spells in a unique way, dont get me wrong, but to me its all just so boring.

and im not saying it doesnt have to work like other fantasy stories, but if the main mechanism behind magic in harry potter is that you are either born with it or not, you dont need a wand but its exponentially more challenging without one (unless you have a unique skillset or education), intention matters, and there are spells that can grant magical abilities to objects. there is so much more possibility than just expelliarmus and expecto patronum. There has to be, or else why tf would hogwarts take 7 years of schooling to graduate from?

so here are some of my headcanons:

families have bloodline abilities

so, in the case of wizarding britan, there are families that want to stay pure such as the sacred 28 (or is it 27 i cant remember), and pure as in their blood and bloodline must stay pure (going so far as to marry your cousins, e.g. Orion and Walburga Black). If this is the case, and they wan't to preserve their magical bloodline so bad, they'd have to have something more than just "magic" to preserve.

I feel like its almost there in canon but falls short of being fully realized. I think of it kinda like how it works in naruto. Theres those who have a bloodline ability and then those that dont. You dont have to have one to be powerful, if you have one it dosent mean you will be powerful automatically.

The black family seems to carry the gene for metamorphmagus, but i wouldnt consder this a bloodline ability and think of it more like a random mutation passed on to teddy, which could occur in any magical person, (theres also the possibility that this was a more common ability in the black family but because of the lack of genetic diversity and inbreeding it was lost until Andromeda had Remadora with Ted, who was not pureblood. I think abilities have to do with the energy of magic that is either created or inherited, not so much genetics. Therefore, families dont pass on the same exact ability but something that is novel or slightly different from person to person.

The Lupins, for example, could be Beast Speakers. Maybe, a long time ago in the Lupin familiy, they kept wolves or something (explaining the surname which would have had something to do with occupation) and they learned from them how to speak with animals?Lyall, who canonically worked in the Department for the Control and Regulation of Dark Creatures, can speak to dark creatures, even werewolves who are transformed. Remus can speak to domesticated animals like cats and dogs, fancy mice, toads, etc. Remus is like Hogwarts' unofficial vet tech, and if you like atyd Remus, this fits in nicely as he specialized in Care of Magical Creatures.

The Potters, canonically, are linked to the Peverell family. The invisibility cloak has been passed down through generations and is still being passed down to Harry's children. I think a common headcanon, and one that i truly love, is that they use Death Magic. But, thats assuming the potters are the exact same family as the Peverells, which they are not. I think, in going along with the Peverell brothers creating the deathly hallows (using advanced death magic), the potters have a Sorcerer's Craft ability. What was the Potter family's source of new money? Fleamont's invention, Sleekeazey's. I know its a "potion", but what if its just like...coconut oil imbued with magical enchantments that make your hair perfect. James could have played a major hand in the creation of the Marauder's Map, an Extremely powerful magical object made to do the impossible task of mapping Hogwarts. And he did this in school. at like 14-15. Harry doesn't do anything that has to do with magic item creation, that I can remember (i haven't read the books in years), however he also had no connection to his family and likely wouldn't be able to learn without another Potter teaching him. BUT! Harry Potter is the master of death, meaning he can use all 3 of the deathly hallows without being corrupted, maybe this could be a side effect of how his Sorcerer's Craft manifests itself.

side tangent, but the reason I think this is an ability even though others have been known to make magical objects, is because the potters are able to do it very creatively, and early on in their lives. They are involved in every aspect of item creation, and they can enchant things in a way no other wizard could replicate, meaning their objects could not be mass produced without their explicit involvement. Maybe Sleekeasy's stops working so well once Fleamont dies, hence why Hermione says its too much hassle to use every day.

The Blacks, you might think, would be something to do with offensive, powerful, and deadly magic. While, yes, this is something that some members of the black family are gifted in, it is not their bloodline ability. I think that the Blacks are Seers. It's no coincidence their families long standing tradition of astrological names are prophetical for their lives. Walburga Black, for example, has the power of Augery. She asks the universe questions and receives omens as answers. She saw a black dog when asking the universe to tell her about her newborn son, hence the name Sirius. For Regulus, well, she saw water. Not knowing what to make of it, she refused to let Regulus near it for his entire childhood. Regulus, as an empath, has the ability of psychometry. The ability to gain information from an object by touching it, including humans ( he cant read minds, but can tell what someone has experienced in their life). This comes in great handiness when he goes to destroy the locket. Sirius, I believe, would have a mastery over tarot cards or oracle cards. He can glean deadly accurate readings, and has a keen ability to interpret meanings unknown to even the most practiced tarot readers. He has a special deck, one that his uncle Alphard gave to him when he found out Sirius could read tarot from Walburga (who, at the time, was very pleased with her Heir's ability). This comes with an emotional expense to Sirius, though, and at times, gives him answers he doesnt want to hear. The girls loved it though, and asked him to teach them. He tried but couldn't explain how he did it, since it's innate to his bloodline. Of course, you could obviously imagine this adding to the piles of angst surrounding the war, as Sirius had to have seen signs that his loved ones would die, making him think he could outsmart fate by changing the secret keeper...

I think this is getting too long, but I'm already thinking about part 2 because I have alot of thoughts about this...especially things that anyone could learn not just inheritied abilities.

[secretcherimaybe]

[nyxshadowhawk]

A Retrospective on Harry Potter

Why did I like it in the first place? What about it worked? Where do I go from here?

I have decided to give up Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling’s reputation now stinks to high heaven. At this point, she is quite indefensible. And even if that weren’t the case, she is not someone that I would want to associate with anyway. Meanwhile, the internet has not only turned against her, but against Harry Potter itself. An innocent question on Reddit, about which Hogwarts Houses the ATLA characters would be in, got downvoted to oblivion. Innumerable Tumblr threads insist that fantasy fans should get into literally anything else (suggestions include Discworld, Earthsea, The Wheel of Time, and Percy Jackson). And now that Harry Potter is no longer a sacred cow, there has been a recent slew of video essays that rip it to shreds, attacking it for its poor worldbuilding, unoriginality, and the problematic ideas baked into the original books (like the whole SPEW thing), etc. Those criticisms always existed, but now they’re getting thrown into the limelight.

It pains me to see such an ignoble downfall of Harry Potter’s reputation. If Rowling had just kept her damn mouth shut, Harry Potter would have aged gracefully, becoming a beloved children’s classic. I'd still plan to introduce it to my own kids one day (after Rowling dies and the dust settles). It’s not surprising that not all aspects of it have aged well, since it’s been more than twenty years since its original publishing date, and everything starts to show its age after that long. I acknowledge that most of the criticisms of the series that I’ve seen lately are valid, and I’ve read plenty of better books. And yet, when I return to the books themselves, even with the knowledge of who JKR really is inside my head, I still really enjoy reading them! There’s still a lot about them that I think works!

None of the other things I’ve read have had as collossal of an impact upon my identity, my values, and my own writing as Harry Potter. It’s hard to move on from it, not just because it’s something I enjoy, but because I have to literally extract my identity from it. I don’t know who I’d be without Harry Potter. I don’t know what my work would look like without Harry Potter. I don’t know how to carry it with me as just another piece of media that I like, as opposed to a filter for who I am as a person. So, with all that in mind, I have to ask myself why I liked Harry Potter so much in the first place. If I’m going to move on from it, then I have to be able to define and isolate the things about it that I want to keep with me. Something about it obviously worked, on a massive scale. So what was it?

It’s not the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is objectively quite terrible, especially in comparison to that of other fantasy writers who knew what they were doing. At best, it’s inconsistent and poorly thought-out, and at worst it’s insensitive or even racist. Is it the characters? The characters are, in my opinion, one of the stronger parts of the story. But I felt very called-out by one of the many online commentators, who said that anyone who identifies with Harry is too cowardly to write self-insert fic. (I do not remember who said it or even which site it was on, but I distinctly remember the phrase, “Reject Harry Potter, embrace Y/N.”) The reason why people get so invested in Harry Potter’s characters is because they’re easy to project upon, and it’s possible that my love of Harry comes more from over a decade’s worth of projection than anything else. The incessant arguments over characters like Snape, Dumbledore, and James Potter ultimately stem from the fact that these characters do not always come across the way Rowling wanted them to. As for the writing itself, it’s decent, but not spectacular. Harry Potter is something of a sandbox world, with less substance than it appears to have and a crapton of missed opportunities, making it ripe for fanfic. For more than ten years, I’ve been doing precisely that — using Harry Potter as a jumping-off point to fill in the gaps and develop my own ideas, some of which became my original projects.

So what does Harry Potter actually have that sets it apart? Why are people so desperate to be part of Harry Potter’s world if the worldbuilding is bad? What, specifically, is so compelling about it? I think that there’s one answer, one thing that is at the center of Potter-mania, and that has been the underlying drive of my love of it for the past decade and a half: the vibe.

Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.

You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.

There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.

There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.

There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”

You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.

The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”

That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.

One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8

Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.

Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:

Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....” A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon.... —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5

What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?

In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.

One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.

Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:

Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak! —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4

I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.

That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.

(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)

The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:

It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.

Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:

If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.

In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:

This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.

The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.

In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.

This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.

Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.

Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.

So what now? Well, that’s the question.

I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.

I'm gonna write the story that I wish Harry Potter was, and when I'm a famous author, I won't become a bigot. I'll see you on the other side.

[halloweeneva]

Aabria really said this story has always been about deconstructing systems of oppression and now we get to talk about what that really means, huh?

[unidentifiedwhistlingobject]

More fun facts about Harry Potter! Neither of them will shock you because Harry Potter's worldbuilding sucks

Every adult in the Harry Potter universe has the capacity to kill anyone by speaking two words. The tool that allows them to do this at any given moment is the same tool with which they perform most of their everyday tasks and without which they would be unable to fully function in wizard society. Imagine if anyone could say two words into their phone and instantly annihilate anyone within sight of them. What the fuck.

The wizards in the Harry Potter universe can prevent a certain magical action (apparating) from happening in certain buildings. The wizard government also employs a kind of magical tripwire on every single child (!?) that alerts them whenever they use that certain magical action. Neither of these two methods of regulation are ever applied to any spell except teleportation, and certainly not the Instant Death Curse.

[bestriordanpottercrossovers]

I have so many memes but I felt it necessary to share this one to the void as it is important to me in this sub genre.

[charlotterhea]

Not meticulously researched, only thought up to fit my story, but I tackled the phenomenon of spells getting cancelled when the caster dies by estimating how much influence the caster still has after casting it. With the Imperius, it's obvious; the caster has a constant hold on the victim and leads it, so there has to be a permanent connection between the caster and the victim - which gets cut off if one side dies. And I think it's not too far-fetched to assume that the body-bind spell might have a similar connection, allowing the caster to modify how thoroughly someone is bound. Sure, we don't get any clues in that direction when the kids use the spell but since it was Dumbledore who cast it, I think it's reasonable to assume that he had more control over it than the kids.

Curses on objects, however, aren't connected to the caster. It would be pretty inconvenient if the caster has to have a constant connection for a curse to work. Instead, the parameters are set with the casting and then it is left to its own.

But tbh, I didn't check the whole book series to see if that explanation works in every instance we see, so maybe I missed something important.

question to the void: what inconsistency in the harry potter series irritates you the most?

[fanfic-lover-girl]

Magical Education in Harry Potter

I have continued reading snippets of HP and I realized once again how...boring the magic is in HP. Besides Snape, Dumbledore and Voldemort I think, no one in HP really does anything exceptional or innovative with their magic. Well...there are the Marauders with their map and their animagus transformations. Plus the Weasley twins are super creative too with their products. But I think that's it really. I will be mega generous and throw in Draco fixing the cabinet and Hermione's DA coins too.

Not even Harry Potter, who is supposed to be the chosen one and hero of the story, does anything great. He's tragically mediocre and not in a good way. I do not consider summoning a patronus at 13 to be a marvel. Considering he had special lessons from Lupin and his performing the spell is not really a special/new/creative magical endeavour.

The muggle world has great technological innovations. But wizards are not innovating magic on the same level at all. And I think part of the problem is their magical education system.

First, starting to learn magic at 11 is total rubbish. Using Avatar: The Last Airbender as an example. Learning magic at 11 is comparable to someone learning they can bend at 5 but they don't start training until 11. Or someone in our world has prodigious abilities but they don't train until high school. Do you see how dumb this is?

So in the meantime, wizard kids have this power that they can't control properly. It's not that big of a deal if the kid has a magical family but what about mugglebornes like Hermione or kids who grew up in muggle families like Harry?? Harry was literally a hazard to the Dursleys in more ways than one and it's understandable, not excusable, that they hated him.

Plus Hermione's character is annoying due to her role as an exposition device. It's tiresome that a muggleborne girl is constantly showing up purebloods who literally grew up around magic. As the books go on, she takes over Ron's role in the trio as the magical common sense guy. In reality, mugglebornes should be at a major disadvantage. Let's say I am trying to learn Spanish. I have no Spanish-speaking family. And let's say I end up in a class of immigrant kids whose parents all speak Spanish. They may not be fluent themselves but they have a huge headstart on me. In time I will catch up to them, especially if I work hard like Hermione, but initially, I would perform worse than them. As first years, the pureblood and halfblood kids should be blowing Hermione out of the water. If not for the entire first year then at least the first semester/term.

So how would I fix this issue? Four ways:

Magical kindergarten/elementary school

Hogwarts should be a highschool/college level institution. Or maybe Hogwarts could have different school levels. Kids should learn the introductory concepts for Charms, Transfiguration, Potions etc in primary/elementary school or even from their freaking parents. Ron's intro scene with that make my rat yellow prank spell was just sad. And having Hermione call him out for the spell not being real was just more salt in my annoyance. As kids, they learn the basics like wand movement, magic theory and safety. And basic spells.

Advanced learning

When they go to Hogwarts they should focus more on application and higher levels of theory. For example: Magical Ethics (what are the moral boundaries of magic **cough**rapedrugs**cough**polyjuicepotion**cough**), Magical Research (do projects/experiments to learn more about the nature of magic, like how is elf magic different from wizard magic), Spellmaking (why is Snape the only dude in HP inventing spells!), Improvised Spells (like in Wizards of Waverly Place), Magic Economics (how does magic work with the concept of scarcity, what is scarcity in the wizarding world), Magical Defense (not just against the dark arts but basic defence like self-defence in our world and perhaps survival skills) etc. They should learn non-verbal and non-wand magic as well of course. Maybe this could be taught at the end of primary school or the beginning of Hogwarts. Instead of the very end of their Hogwarts education.

Accessible classes for mugglebornes

So what about mugglebornes, you say? Well, there are two options. You can provide after-school classes for muggleborne students to learn magic before they attend Hogwarts. Think of extra lessons or night classes in our world. Or you can send the mugglebornes to summer school(s) before Hogwarts which leads me to my next point.

Different Class Tracks

Put muggleborne kids in a different class track from the purebloods/halfbloods who went to magical primary. Like how we have advanced classes for students who are super bright or slower-paced classes for students who need extra help. Students like Hermione would gradually graduate to the advanced track while lazier students like Harry may stay in the slower track. Or maybe bright students like Hermione could do placement tests to get into the advanced track from the start. Some pureblood students could even be demoted to the slower track if they begin to goof off (maybe Ron) or need extra help (maybe Neville). And you can mix and match! So Neville would be in Class 1 Herbology but Class 2 Potions :). Maybe Harry would be in Class 1 DADA but Class 2 Potions etc.

If lack of teachers is an issue, then pureblood families would teach their own kids and the primary school would be exclusively for muggleborne kids and/or pureblood/halfblood kids whose parents can't provide tutoring.

Conclusion

So yeah, that's how I would revamp the school system. Hogwarts is a weird school. Like students leave as adults but leaving Hogwarts feels like leaving primary school. I never felt prepared for the world after highschool but at least we have college/university. Even if HP has trade schools/apprenticeships for jobs like healing and being an auror, I think their magical education is seriously lacking. And the spellwork in HP is honestly very lame. Wands just end up being like guns. More battles should be like the Voldy vs Dumbles fight in book 5.

Magic should be something kids learn from the cradle. Magic is not a subject like Math is. Magic is literally part of who they are. Learning magic should be treated like learning how to groom yourself, eat healthily or even speak. It's strange how Hogwarts and the ministry restrict students from learning magic outside of classes. Maybe it's a conspiracy??

[fiendishfyre]

My tired rear just wants to rewrite the whole magic system in HP, it drives me nuts sometimes.

[nevermindigotthis]

Do you ever look at a magic system and go „well they‘re all just incredibly unimaginative?“ yeah…

next up: the broom powered wheelchair

[kjmellow]

Let's talk

Magical systems

I have been considering this for some time, because I'm reading, watching and writing things that have magic in them, and I have managed to single out three categories of magics that seem basic:

Intention-based refers to the type of magic where you picture the result and it just happens. No specific rituals or magical words required.

Word-based refers to spells, when a specific spell-word yields specific results.

Sign-based is a somewhat broad category, which includes magical signs and sigils, runes, chalk circles, ingredients required to work a specific spell or a special movement that you have to do to perform magic.

And here are a few examples that came to my mind as I was making this, and I do encourage additions and speculation:

Let's elaborate!

Okay Diana Wynne Jones has probably written every single one of these magical systems, it's just that they're too confusing for me to classify each and every instance, because there are hardly any descriptions. It doesn't help that all her stories are more or less like So they usually do magic this way BUT our protagonist has their own way. But Christopher Chant aka Chrestomanci, for example, is very clearly an intention-based enchanter, because he just makes things go his way. In The Magicians of Caprona they specifically sing spells, and their quality depends on how well they are sung (written spells are still word-based spells, by the way). In House of Many Ways doing a spell is described in detail (which doesn't mean much since Charmain has her way of making magic anyway, but it's there, to show how spells were supposed to work all along), and it has ingredients and special actions and words to say or write. Then, since it's all the same universe as Howl's Moving Castle, I'm just singling out Sophie for intention+words, because what she uses is not necessarily spells, but she just magically talks things into being a certain way, so they also kinda are.

Harry Potter had brave attempts at a straight-forward wagical system, but then some spells require unnecessarily difficult and precise wand movements to move a fricking feather, while you just point at someone to unalive them. Still, sort of falls into this crossover of categories, I GUESS.

Doctor Strange was the only example of sign-based magic that came to my mind, but I think it's a very good example. They literally wave their hands around in a certain way and make glowy things out of thin air. Amazing. Wish I could do that.

The Owl House, in my opinion, is a prime example of intention+sign, because it literally said so in the show. I think it was when Luz was trying to teach Eda and Lilith wild magic, because there are only four basic sigils, and they make so many combinations, yes, but you can ALSO shape the outcome by picturing what shape you want your spell to take. And I think they do pretty much the same thing when they draw those circles and imagine what they want to happen, so here it is.

Addition that's not on the graph: Carrionites from that one Doctor Who episode about Shakespeare are word-based. That was the whole plot point.

Anyway, here's my take on a topic which I mostly cleared up into a system for myself, and I would love to see what others think about it. Maybe there's a secret fourth thing I have somehow overlooked... And I would also love to see people add their fandoms to the pile :)

[gabwynart]

So, you want a magic/power system with multiple categories assigned by birth or luck, where each category has different applications and uses outside of combat, based on real-life sciences like physics and chemistry. This system includes shapeshifting and the ability to add runes, symbols,tattoos and objects of power to improve or learn new abilities. Additionally, each ability represents the psychological mind of its user. There are also specialists who don't fit into any of the categories and therefore possess really cool, unique powers. In this system, training and discipline are more important than talent AND the world is populated with a rich fauna of fantastical beasts, animals, and plants??

And also you should add paranormal, esoteric and espiritual entities and rules that applies to all the cultures but each culture have to be unique !

huhhhh

[euphorial-docx]

hypothetically speaking, if a wizard knew how to do wandless and nonverbal spells and also was a legilimens, could that wizard cast spells on someone from within their mind? all hypothetical of course. totally don’t want to maybe write this.

[samkee00]

Friendly reminder that JKR is a racist, antisemitic, holocaust denying transphobe who actively uses the money she makes from Harry Potter to make life worse for thousands of people. If you follow me and I see you posting Harry Potter shit, I will block you.

I was a big fan of HP as a kid, too. I was in the fucking Dumbledore's Army club hosted by my school. Even if the series was formative for you, you have to let it go if you care about other human beings at all. There is no "death of the author" when the author is alive and using the popularity of their work to ruin lives.

[joncronshawauthor]

he Echoes of The Belgariad: Eddings’ Influence on Modern Fantasy

Once upon a time, as all good stories start, in the small town of Spokane, Washington, a man by the name of David Eddings put pen to paper and began to weave a tale of prophecy, magic and, most importantly, a farm boy named Garion. A tale that, unbeknownst to him, would shape the course of modern fantasy literature. This tale? “The Belgariad.” The Chosen One Now, I know what you’re thinking.…

[chaossauceart]

Im of the opinion that if you’re making a magic system in your fantasy world it should always connect to the themes and meanings of your story or characters in some way. That’s part of the reason Harry Potters magic system is so ASS.