and the "but they want to be slaves. they are happier" bullshit. at least it was house elves and she didn't have it be the castle brownies or something like that. her editor (read: dog) probably talked her out of that one

There is that, but her plagiarism was kinda close to Vanilla Ice saying that he didn’t sample Under Pressure. A little aggressive, especially for her inflated ego and billions of dollars.

Absolutely agree about the other part though. She didn’t need the money to make her a shitty person, that was all original.

We don't talk about rectumsempra

Yeah soft magic requires restraint to do well. Sanderson's laws are a really good way to make sure you're not writing a really boring magic system.

A good writer could do cool stuff with that. It doesn't even have to be laziness, but the lack of necessity for innovation.

A fun example is Project Hail Mary. The alien species in it is highly intelligent and has invented space travel, but has no computer technology. It's not that they lack the capacity and ingenuity required to develop computers, but because the structure of their brains that developed for extremely advanced audio processing in an environment without light made them extremely good at mathematics. They never had a need to invent calculators, so they never progressed down the technological path that would eventually lead to computers.

The wizards in HP are a weird mixture of so reliant on magic that simple logic and basic low tech solutions to problems are mystifying, but also, they forget to use magic, like, all the time. They are always doing things like getting rained on when the impervious charm exists, forgetting that the accio charm exists when they need to grab something before someone else finds it, when they bind someone in shackles instead of magically stunning or binding them, when their clothes don't fit, when they don't just duplicate items that dont break Gamps laws, when they make Filch and Hagrid do so much manual labor that could be accomplished with swipe of a wand, etc.

Notably, they absolutely botch the "rescue" mission at the end of Order of the Pheonix and get Sirius killed in trying to save him becuase they fail to utilize the many magical means they have to communicate and travel.

First, they forget that Harry was given a magic mirror to contact Sirius at any time for moments just like this. But let's chock that up to human error, fine.

But then they also forget that they have a contact in the castle that can also visit the Black house, the painting of Phineas Nigellus. Even if they aren't sure they can get to the headmaster's office (even though he definitely could as he does later in the book), they know that the painting's inhabitants can travel between frames and could go to retieve him. But, ok, chock that up to human error number 2.

Instead they decide to break into Umbridge's office to use her fireplace to speak to Sirius through the floo network. Cool. But then instead of just walking through and going look for him, Harry just sticks his head in and starts yelling which allows Kreacher to control the narrative and trick Harry into Voldemort's plot. And of course he gets caught by Umbridge because his ass is still in her office (and Hermione gets caught too because she inexplicably rmeoved the invisibility cloak).

But then, even later when they get rid of Umbridge and her slytherin minions, and they are trying to figure out how to get to London, nobody realizes that Harry's head was just fucking in London. The fireplace is completely unguarded now and they know you can floo in directly to the ministry. Alternatively, they could just get to Hogsmeade and hail the Knight Bus, or find a sympathetic adult who can do side along apparation to get them there immediately. Or go back to the castle and get Snape's help getting there or to the Order.

Instead they ride the Thestrals which takes "several hours" to reach London by which time they should totally have expected Sirius to already be dead. They don't bring the cloak to the ministry either even though they are under the impression that they will have to break in too. All of this is just dumb dumb dumb.

The fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a fun foil to this aspect of the series. It absolutely is a bit pretentious and preachy at points, but the genuine exploration of what is possible in the established system was pretty fun imo.

Yes, IIRC the "Unforgivable Curses" either carry a death penalty or wizard prison forever or something. But by the third or forth book every bad guy is a Wizard Nazi who doesn't care about those consequences and the good guys are all fighting Wizard Nazis and are at least semi-justified in trying to kill them right back.

It basically devolves instantly into gun-fights, except instead of guns it's a specific spell.

It's fifteen goals. While unlikely, it's totally possible for a team to score fifteen goals more if the skill difference is high enough and the game is allowed to go for long enough.

You’re definitely right about it being a poorly-contrived scoring system, but there are a few games in the books where the team lost the game but grabbed the snitch. It’s always described as a “stem the bleeding” type decision

Edit: sorry, now seeing the replies to your other comments saying this, I guess you know by now 😅

They won the game, but they may have lost the league if winning comes down to point differences.

Quidditch was invented in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend. I had been pondering the things that hold a society together, cause it to congregate and signify its particular character and knew I needed a sport. It infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it.

Like most team sports have you work as a team to score points. Everyone participates and are more or less responsible for the outcome of the game.

A better writing of the game would have had other players working as a team to spot the Snitch. Or alternative strategies for leveraging the extra player in the early game, when finding the Snitch was unlikely. Or even just a history of the sport, or variations of amateur and professional rules, or a pro-league that got more than a casual mention for the first chapter of the fourth book and then never again.

you have that and then you have one team member that is just more special than everyone else

You could argue the pitcher in baseball or the QB in football fill a similar role.

But yes, the need to make Harry a Mary Sue at every opportunity definitely dragged on the series. The better parts of the series were when he wasn't the center of attention and was more just an observer of a magical world.

Same concept but kinda from the opposite direction, kinda like elder scrolls. Magic used to be super powerful and utterly broken but over time it's degraded for one reason or another some things and groups still have access to the old magic but as a whole it's pretty inaccessible. This is kinda how magic works in Elder Scrolls, the magic of the Dawn Era and Merithic Era were fucken broken world bending shit that did things like turning Solstheim into an island instead of a peninsula, but the world has since gained too much internal stability or perhaps instability to allow such things all that often, but scratching into that requires getting into Elder Scrolls meta physics which just no.

My head canon is always converting magic into sci fi.

Arthur C. Clarke will be by to collect royalties.

Doesn’t really explain the Snitch though, other than “they’re more about tradition than logic”.

Lots of sports spring out of a bunch of silly children's games that get increasingly bureaucratic to sell tickets.

Why not end the game with a timer or at a certain score count? Why introduce a fairy trapped in a golden ball who has some kind of personality, rather than just being a buzzing semi-invisible toy? Why not yadda yadda?

Rowling definitely left a lot on the table.

Sure, but I'm one of the very few people in this thread that didn't go in that direction so I'm not really sure why you're directing that point at me.

Though I guess the main point would be that if the game can only end after someone catches the snitch, you'd still rather it be you than the other team.

In many sports, how much you lose by matters for certain things like rankings and such. Like say the other team has 160+ more points than you. Clearly your team is catastrophically terrible at the game to have ended up in that position. You're probably not catching up.

Even if you have faith they could make 2 goals, there's no real way to time catching the snitch at exactly the right moment, nor to make sure the other seeker doesn't get it in that time.

So in general it's probably better to put your team out of its misery and lose by 10 points rather than by over 300 points.

I think a reasonable game could be played with those rules, given how quickly goals are scored and how hard it is supposed to be to catch the snitch. It's just that it didn't make sense at all that Krum was celebrated. Catching the snitch was worse than scoring an own goal in soccer because it directly and immediately caused his team to lose the match. The rioting of the death eaters after the match is understandable, but the way everyone else behaved towards this obvious fraud is not. The Ministry should have started a match fixing investigation.