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)
Who sanderson
Brandon. Look up Mistborn. Steelheart and The Stormlight Archives are good too.
thank 💖
Tress and the emerald sea is a good starter. It’s in the cosmere, but it’s shorter and kind of gives a feel.
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.
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.
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.
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
Thank you for posting this! I spent a whole day off reading it and even forgot to go to bed on time 😅
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.
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.
For real. The concept of becoming a master over a wand is world breaking in retrospect. Ron talks about using a hand-me-down wand in the first book, which basically means he was hampered from the beginning by not having a wand that recognized him as its master. And all the wand disarming Harry did means he should have approximately 37 wands that prefer him over their owners.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Probably because its a shitty TERF series. Read better books, watch better movies.
There’s was almost no magic!
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.
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.
Or they’re just lazy? 🤔
Yeah, OP must not spend much time around teenagers
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.
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.
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.
