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)
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!
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
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.
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.
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
Magic systems are not about what is possible, but the limitations.
Deep reply
It’s literally just memorizing bad latin, of course they were bored. There was no spiritual aspect to it at all
Edit: And don’t think I forgot the time JK Rowling assumed a word meant “Friendly to thieves” because it was of African Origin when it actually meant “The Color Red in a spiritual context.”, racist assclown
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.
Honestly Accio seemed to fail close to 80% of the time.
It would have been much better if she styled her spells like pokemon moves with accuracy % and the caster stats affecting speed, evasiveness, boosts, resistance, etc.
The whole allegiance of wands thing could fit that
I love Brandon Sanderson, but his world building and complex magic systems aren’t for most people. I’ve tried to get my wife to read his stuff for years and she just has never gotten into it.
The reason Harry Potter was so commercially successful is because the vast majority of the public doesn’t want to learn about allomantic properties of 16 different metals and how they have internal/external, physical/mental, enhancement/temporal and pushing/pulling effects.
They don’t want to learn about adhesion, gravitation, division, abrasion, progression, illumination, transformation, cohesion, and tension surges - and how bonding a spren through oathes increases your ability to surgebind. Their eyes glaze over when talking about the cognitive and physical realms.
Most people just want to hear “yeah some people are magic and can wave wands, say some magic words and poof magic happens.” That’s why it’s one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
But yeah, I’ve just learned to accept that while I love some Sanderson magic systems, it’s not ever gonna be for everyone. And that’s ok.
Not only that, he struggles with any kind of romantic relationship writing. My wife also tried to read mistborn but kind of lost her shit when the only thing described was a short kiss across all that time.
Well, the needs of a fiction reader and the needs of a character in the world are different. Harry actually needed to learn magic. And there’s no logic to it, so all he could do was rote memorisation. He would have been happier with a magic system that makes sense.
Hermione is supposed to be a genius nerd, and yet she does far less in 7 books to actually study her magic system, than Vin has done by the start of the second book. Vin isn’t a nerd or a genius, she’s just a capable hero living in a world where magic makes sense, so she’s better at studying than Hermione. Hermione gets 8 hours to do it a day for 6 years and still can’t compete with Vin.
What is this post even? One of the main plot points of one of the books was about how the students are so engaged that they made an underground secret class to study and learn.
Harry literally stays up all night studying his books during summer break in the earlier years, the book describes how it’s all he can think about. (before schooling became a lower priority due to the active war).
There are always going to be boring classes, and the book describes that even Hermione is bored in some of them, but typically the students are always engaged, it’s clear that Hermione is a hard worker with doctor parents that expect a lot from her, not that she is some hyper genius.
Harry is a rich jock and a literal child, he is the common trope of the school athlete that slacks in classes occasionally and likes trouble making.
I think it’s very clear that the students were generally engaged in engaging classes with good teachers (hagrids classes, PE / flying, defense against the dark arts, the gardening class with the screaming plants), disengaged in classes that would have equivalent perceptions of boringness (history of magic).
I think magic went through a dark age in the HP universe, where all the words that were imbued with power were done so aeons ago, and then that knowledge of how they came to be was lost, with only a few handful having been rediscovered in the modern era.
Exceptions like “Point me” might just be english analogs of existing spells, rather than new inventions.
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.
That guy had at least three magic systems going at once. It was a lot.
There was sympathy, which was kind of like voodoo dolls and also sometimes casting from hit points? Sygildry or something which was programming with magic runes. And Naming, which I believe was like grokking something so well you could just command it to do whatever.
I think I was thinking of sympathy when I wrote that comment… It was more than just akin to voodoo, but yeah def similar. I just like how he described the practice of it, and what was going on in Kvothe’s mind as he did it.
Had to look it up, I’m specifically referring to “Alar”: https://kingkiller.fandom.com/wiki/Alar
Splitting your mind into several parts and being able to hold different, often conflicting, realities as true in order to affect the physical world… Thought that was neat.
Even AHS Coven had more interesting magic than Hairy Pooper
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.
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.
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.
What’s boring about the magic system in Harry Potter? Can you give specific examples?
- 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.
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.
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.
Sanderson is such a beast, everything he has written that I’ve read is solid gold!
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?
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
Nothing memorable enough to mention.
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.
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.
Thank you for posting this! I spent a whole day off reading it and even forgot to go to bed on time 😅
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.
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.
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.
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.
Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.
Sounds like that’s just where we disagree. I would instead say that magic is part of the world being shown in the story, and it should have an explanation, just like laws of physics. The hints come not from the narrator knowing things and dropping clues, but from the underlying logic of how magic works and the behaviors of people shaped by the magic of the world. And of course the reader can’t anticipate everything - but I also want there to be a sense of what’s possible and what’s not, and for the cases where the reader’s understanding is broken to be impactful and bring new understanding.
So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of preference. I can look at HP and think “man, the magic just does whatever the fuck the author needs”, and other people can look at it and enjoy the whimsical adventure for what it is. Or, in a way, I guess it’s both - I can still appreciate the story, but it’s underlined with a sense of shallowness.
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.
It’s a shit story, just not because of a ‘bad’/soft magic system.
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.
Expecto patronum, et voila, deus ex machina.
They set it up at the beginning of the movie? How is that a deus ex machina?
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 don’t give a shit about Sanderson. I just read his second book and frankly I think his magic system is overrated. But at least he is consistent
