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)
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)
By making the wizards so useless it bypasses any of the logical problems posed by creating a world with magic in it. There’s no “why no use this spell” “why not magic out of this problem” etc. all because the wizards are too useless to actually do anything
One of the big ideas about magic in his universe isn’t just that the wizards are useless but that using magic is more trouble then it’s worth. It creates all sorts of left over magic residue that can build up to a myriad of effects.
We see the wizards preform powerful spells, showing that they can do have power and do have a certain degree of knowledge, but rather choose not to.
The duty of the wizards is more to make sure no one preforming magic willy nilly and to prevent people from making sorcerers.
You’re right! I finished Sourcery like 6 months ago and have read a bunch of other books since then so my memory was kinda foggy. But that’s exactly it, the magic exists and can be powerful but it’s simply more trouble than it’s worth
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
The wizards series of the discworld books are by far my favourite, but for exactly the reason you’ve set out. (Similarly with the witches)
The dialogue between the faculty is so believable and so stupifyingly inane and political that it’s hard to say that anything is more probable.
Anyone actually interested in how magic works gets ignored and all that really matters is where the next good meal is coming from.
Just one of the countless reasons that Terry pratchett is a gem of an author.
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.
NECROMANCY!?
I’m a member of the College of Winterhold, In good stead.
No, not necromancy, we like to call it post mortem communication
Life magic
I’m currently going though the books and from what I can tell, Harry especially takes issues with some teachers. He hates history and doesn’t understand divination but he’s fine with charms, defense against the dark arts and even potions once Snape no longer teaches it.
It’s just that during the lessons she describes, they usually have stuff like Quidditch or Voldemort stuff going on so they don’t really pay attention. They also don’t like doing homework so they let Hermione do it for them. And they still did pretty well on the OWLs so all in all, I think they were fine with class but by and large, she just doesn’t really write about classes that went their regular course.
My issue is honestly just the inconsistency of when spells would work or wouldn’t. That and the fact that many dangerous situations could have been ended immediately if they used a spell they knew. I watched the movies and was yelling at the screen to use a certain spell to solve the situation but they just run away scared and helpless.
If you didn’t see the other comment, you really should check out the fanfic “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.” It’s almost 2,000 pages, extremely well written, and (to give you an idea of how the story feels) one of the first things Harry does when he visits Gringotts for the first time is realize that since the wizarding world uses a precious-metals-based currency, a competent hedge fund manager could be the richest person in the wizarding world in about a week.
It says a lot about Rowling that Hermionesl’s one flaw was being an abolitionist
In the books Harmoniems is pretty flawed, book smart, but totally unfamiliar with wizard business and the magical blokes, she knows the book stuff, not the culture stuff.
Knew enough to understand slavery is bad
The reader hardly knows about the culture shit. How is it that we don’t know voldermort can hear anyone say his name until the last book?
Well… you know why. Because JK wrote them first book to last without really planning what happens next or why, and didn’t bother tying stuff in to the previous books unless it occurred to her without checking.
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.
Stories don’t have to have “hard” magic systems to be good. I’m a big fan of the magical realism popular in Latin American fiction - where the magic is ambiguous and never quite explained at all.
The problem is the way that Rowling uses magic.
Rowling was clearly writing mystery novels, while lifting a lot of ideas for her setting from like The Worst Witch series. She uses magic spells like a Checkhov’s gun kind of thing, usually establishing whatever magical principle will save the day earlier in the novel. With a relatively self contained story, it works really well. Prisoner of Azkaban is one of her stronger books - the way that she sets up the mystery with the time turner as well as the stuff with Sirius Black, etc - because it’s very “clean” in this way. She introduces a bunch of new elements to her world, but they are all tied around supporting her story. This is good writing.
The problem is that Harry Potter books don’t work as an overarching story. It is abundantly clear that the Horcruxes and Deathly Hallows were not planned from the beginning. Rowling got to the last two books, realized that she needed to write some kind of ending, and then completely drove her plot off the rails.
You could say because she didn’t have an established magic system, it made it easier to drive off the rails, but really, it’s more that she’s competent at writing stand alone mystery novels (which really, that’s what books 1-4 are and they’re the best in the series for it) and not larger narratives. She doesn’t know how to convey the scope of a war, she doesn’t know how to tie together an Epic fantasy.
It’s abundantly clear the ending of book 1 wasn’t even planned. Harry Potter doesn’t even work when you look at each book individually. Even by YA standards.
I rank them 3>2>4>1>5>7(w/out epilogue)>6>7
I think the ending of the first book was planned, just clumsily executed. It’s a mystery novel - she places all of these red herrings/misdirection. The reveal that Snape was actually saying a counter course with the flying bludger incident is “cute” and goes with the muddled messages and themes she has around that character.
She knew where she wanted to get to, it’s just one of the more “Idiot Ball” driven plots of the series (along with the fifth book). Harry does stupid impulsive shit because that’s his character, and the world just has to react to it. Harry logic isn’t normal people logic, so by the end of the story we’ve kinda lost track of the plot.
It’s no Earthsea but it’s serviceable paperback detective fiction for children.
third year was my favorite as well; it was easily the most compelling story and makes the death of Sirius that much more painful in 6
I think that’s a very apt way to put it.
A service le paperback detective fiction for kids.
I’ve had friendships end over basically that statement.
The series is pleasant to read. It’s no different than reading a Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Colleen Hoover novel, just targeted at a younger audience. The fandom culture around it was fun - especially for those of us who essentially “grew up” with Harry by being roughly the same age as him at each release.
Not every novel needs to be Pale Fire or JR.
It is objectively poorly written and poorly constructed. That’s not really up for debate. The idea that it’s acceptable for small children is it’s only saving grace. Any adult who likes it is blinded by nostalgia or has built a personality around it.
I “grew up” with it. I read them as they came out as I was about the age. It was known to be slop for children back then.
It’s not a binary from bad to acceptable. There’s A LOT of range in YA books and a lot of good ones. Rowlings issue is so fundamental it really would prevent her from writing any kind of book. She simply packed the knowledge about writing to do any amount of planning ahead. She’s constantly pulling out a McGuffin and insulting the intelligence of her readers. There’s no thought put into the world. The characters don’t come to life. It has the sensibility of Willy Wonka and the set design by Tim Burton. Her writing is closer to a single stream of consciousness than a deliberate plot because she lacked, and probably still lacks, the literary skill or expertise to actually craft that.
Her success is entirely due to factors outside her control and is in spite of her characteristic lack of ability.
Also; Tom Clancy sucks. In fact, Tom Clancy <<< Clive Cussler- and Cussler is mediocre at best.
Yeah, hard magic is not necessary. It’s like “fit living and exercise” is conceptually easy, but the majority of people aren’t really that fit and certainly not Olympic level athletes etc.
Magic could be a combination of luck, genetics, and ability to stick to it and study. THOSE can be hard for a lot of people in practice, but in concept easy at a lot of levels.
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.
Maybe you would like that fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. A large part of it is poking fun at how magic works and how wizards behave and how dumb Quidditch is.
For example there are all kinds of rules about Transfiguration that don’t make sense and that is explored quite a bit.
Thank you for posting this! I spent a whole day off reading it and even forgot to go to bed on time 😅
I do love how it feels very much like a parody but turns into an honestly straight up good story on its own
how dumb Quidditch is
Pretty sure she just didn’t get sports.
Why even have the kids trying to kill each other for 30 minutes, just wait for the snitch and whoever gets it wins.
could you imagine in any major sport if the entirety of the people in the stands could directly affect the individual players? And with the anonymity of the magic, even going out in public would be a dangerous proposition. Imagine a teen sitting on a balcony over a busy street, just jinxing drivers for shits and giggles.
is this not just affirming the premise of the sixth book? that’s the whole reason why Potter found the Prince’s spells so fascinating. school subjects are not meant to entertain. they are meant to teach.
also, as book five attests–as well as does the subject of history of magic–some syllabi and some subjects were way more boring than others.
my main gripe would be that nobody taught english or any other form of formal communication at hogwarts. i dunno how they all just didn’t end up speaking like Hagrid.
I like the universes where being taught can also be fun. It has the funny side effect of making the pupil want to learn even more!
Fuck the universes that keep entertainment and learning separate.
There’s was almost no magic!
Or they’re just lazy? 🤔
Yeah, OP must not spend much time around teenagers
Not any more than your average school kid I’d say. There are many subjects that are or can be interesting that are thought in schools, but can be taught in the most boring way. They enjoyed DADA with Lupin quite much for example.
There are also other subjects not related to practicing magic directly.
Yeah, book 3 is the one where Rowling made an effort to delve into the workings of the magic system. The Patronus is the only spell we actually learn how to cast. (No, levio-sah doesn’t count). The time turner has limitations which allow Rowling to tell an interesting story with it.
Rowling made magic interesting for one book, and Harry became interested in magic.
Then she changed her mind.
Probably because its a shitty TERF series. Read better books, watch better movies.
Just like all the worst real-world school subjects, her magic system isn’t something with a logic you can learn to understand, it’s something arbitrary you have to memorize. These poor kids are out here taking the equivalent of anatomy classes all day (why is that bone called the tibia? Don’t worry about it, just memorize it).
What’s boring about the magic system in Harry Potter? Can you give specific examples?
Nothing memorable enough to mention.
- No limits on how often you can cast spells
- No explanation of how magic actually works
- No explanation of how magic objects are created
- No explanation of how spells are invented
- No explanation of how different species’ magic differs
- All the spell names are silly words in English and poorly understood Latin
- Never explained why incantations or gestures are needed
- Never explained what makes spells other than Patronus hard or easy
- Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than “they learned a lot of spells”
- Few/no limitations on spells, or limitations aren’t explained
- No contextually dependent spells
- It’s impossible to predict what will happen in the books based on understanding the magic system
- There are just. no. rules.
Brandon Sanderson is the best magic system writer in the world, and these are his “laws of magic” for creating an interesting magic system:
The First Law
Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
The Second Law
Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this: Limitations > Powers
(Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way: Ω > | though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)The Third Law
The third law is as follows: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
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.
Sanderson is such a beast, everything he has written that I’ve read is solid gold!
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.
That’s the backstory of Gloryhammer
Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than “they learned a lot of spells”
This obviously relates to the amount of midi-chlorians the wizard have
Do terrestrial wizards have midichlorians the same way space wizards do?
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.
Harry Potter has a soft magic system - a system where pretty much everything can be explained by “a wizard did it”, worlds like that are mystical 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)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 it 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.
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
I think Star Wars’ magic system has rules. They’re philosophical rules.
If you’re paying attention to The Force Awakens, you notice that Rey is losing to Kylo, up until she gets angry at him. And then her stance changes, and she starts attacking way faster. Rey used the dark side. You only notice that happening if you understand the rules of the Force. And if you do, in the next movie, you’re rewarded. Luke is teaching Rey, and she goes straight to the dark. Rey is a natural dark side user, way moreso than Anakin and Luke. If you knew the magic system, you saw that coming. Now, what this subplot culminates in is Rey Palpatine, which is bad writing. But that’s not the magic system’s fault. The magic system did its job perfectly. It’s possible to understand how magic works in Star Wars, and that gives you insight into what will happen next. That’s basically a tweak on Sanderson’s first law. Episodes 8 and 9 also expand on the whole dyad thingy instead of adding something new, just like Sanderson says. And The Last Jedi introduces a limitation (You can’t force project this far, the effort would kill you), and then uses it later in the same movie with Luke. The underlying principles of Sanderson’s laws are there. The magic has rules and the rules inform the story.
i wasn’t really thinking of star wars, moreso LOTR if anything, the magic there is the textbook definition of “a wizard did it” and yet despite that it’s a beloved series and very few call for Gandalf’s powers to have an understandable magical system behind them. but that’s a gourmet meal of a book & the trilogy movie series, harry potter is junk food, enjoyable as long as you don’t think too hard about what the ingredients are
We do, at the very least, know why Gandalf’s magic works. The universe was sung into being, and Gandalf is a divine being who can participate in that song. We know where his magic comes from. We know it’s divine in origin.
We don’t know where Harry’s magic comes from. Were wizard blessed by a god? Is it a magic gene? Is it fueled by intelligence, or imagination? There are no answers.
Take horcruxes vs the one ring. One is clearly a second rate copy of the other. But the one ring has a clear limitation for Sauron: It holds most of his power, and if it’s destroyed, he can be defeated. What limitation do horcruxes have for Voldemort? He has to split his soul into parts. What does that mean practically? Nothing. It’s not a limitation, it’s just a reason the good guys don’t use it. From the council of Elrond, we know the rules of the one ring, and we know how to use them to solve a problem. Sanderson’s first law. Its limitation for Sauron is more interesting than its power for Sauron. Its limitation for the Fellowship is more interesting than its power for the Fellowship. Sanderson’s second law.
