You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
Here's something I was thinking about as I was contemplating hitting the snooze button this morning:
I've only ever heard of character "agency" in the context of them not having it. But it seems like anything that happens in a fictional story exists to move the plot forward. Of course the main character(s) don't have any agency, if on page 4 he decided to go home and watch TV, and then 200 pages of his uneventful life happened it would be awful.
Where's the line between "plot armor" and "story necessity"?
To use an example from the recent Hunger Games:
Katniss successfully wards off an attack while stranded in a tree when young Rue suddenly appears to show Katniss that a swarm of deadly wasps are placed A) easily within her reach and directly below her waiting assailants.
Let's think about the amazing series of contrivances that have to occur for this very necessary plot-point to transpire:
- Katniss has to be trapped in a tree.
- Her assailants have to be placed below her.
- All four assailants have to be soundly asleep.
- Rue has to appear from nowhere (despite the playing field being several square miles) and notify Katniss without waking her enemies.
- Katniss has to already be awake.
- Katniss has to have already obtained a knife.
- That knife has to have a saw-tooth edge.
- Katniss' sawing of the limb has to still be quiet enough to not wake those below.
- Rue has to be a nice person who, despite the only impetus of her being in the Games, has no desire to kill Katniss.
- The wasps have to not be disturbed by Katniss as she shakes them off the tree.
If ANY of those events did not occur, Katniss would be dead. Very, very dead, either by her four enemies or the wasps or Rue.
That . . . is plot armor.
Of course, a lot of those can be combined. For example, being trapped in a tree kind of requires assailants to be below you, and there's nothing indicating that humans are immune to fatigue in the future.
And that last bit is wrong and makes me wonder if you were paying attention to the movie.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Here's something I was thinking about as I was contemplating hitting the snooze button this morning:
I've only ever heard of character "agency" in the context of them not having it. But it seems like anything that happens in a fictional story exists to move the plot forward. Of course the main character(s) don't have any agency, if on page 4 he decided to go home and watch TV, and then 200 pages of his uneventful life happened it would be awful.
Where's the line between "plot armor" and "story necessity"?
To use an example from the recent Hunger Games:
Katniss successfully wards off an attack while stranded in a tree when young Rue suddenly appears to show Katniss that a swarm of deadly wasps are placed A) easily within her reach and directly below her waiting assailants.
Let's think about the amazing series of contrivances that have to occur for this very necessary plot-point to transpire:
- Katniss has to be trapped in a tree.
- Her assailants have to be placed below her.
- All four assailants have to be soundly asleep.
- Rue has to appear from nowhere (despite the playing field being several square miles) and notify Katniss without waking her enemies.
- Katniss has to already be awake.
- Katniss has to have already obtained a knife.
- That knife has to have a saw-tooth edge.
- Katniss' sawing of the limb has to still be quiet enough to not wake those below.
- Rue has to be a nice person who, despite the only impetus of her being in the Games, has no desire to kill Katniss.
- The wasps have to not be disturbed by Katniss as she shakes them off the tree.
If ANY of those events did not occur, Katniss would be dead. Very, very dead, either by her four enemies or the wasps or Rue.
That . . . is plot armor.
Of course, a lot of those can be combined. For example, being trapped in a tree kind of requires assailants to be below you, and there's nothing indicating that humans are immune to fatigue in the future.
And that last bit is wrong and makes me wonder if you were paying attention to the movie.
What, about the wasps?
Katniss certainly wasn't bothered by them to the extent the others (who died) were. The wasps waited fairly patiently for her to cut their nest down before going bat-shit.
Here's something I was thinking about as I was contemplating hitting the snooze button this morning:
I've only ever heard of character "agency" in the context of them not having it. But it seems like anything that happens in a fictional story exists to move the plot forward. Of course the main character(s) don't have any agency, if on page 4 he decided to go home and watch TV, and then 200 pages of his uneventful life happened it would be awful.
Where's the line between "plot armor" and "story necessity"?
To use an example from the recent Hunger Games:
Katniss successfully wards off an attack while stranded in a tree when young Rue suddenly appears to show Katniss that a swarm of deadly wasps are placed A) easily within her reach and directly below her waiting assailants.
Let's think about the amazing series of contrivances that have to occur for this very necessary plot-point to transpire:
- Katniss has to be trapped in a tree.
- Her assailants have to be placed below her.
- All four assailants have to be soundly asleep.
- Rue has to appear from nowhere (despite the playing field being several square miles) and notify Katniss without waking her enemies.
- Katniss has to already be awake.
- Katniss has to have already obtained a knife.
- That knife has to have a saw-tooth edge.
- Katniss' sawing of the limb has to still be quiet enough to not wake those below.
- Rue has to be a nice person who, despite the only impetus of her being in the Games, has no desire to kill Katniss.
- The wasps have to not be disturbed by Katniss as she shakes them off the tree.
If ANY of those events did not occur, Katniss would be dead. Very, very dead, either by her four enemies or the wasps or Rue.
That . . . is plot armor.
Of course, a lot of those can be combined. For example, being trapped in a tree kind of requires assailants to be below you, and there's nothing indicating that humans are immune to fatigue in the future.
And that last bit is wrong and makes me wonder if you were paying attention to the movie.
What, about the wasps?
Katniss certainly wasn't bothered by them to the extent the others (who died) were. The wasps waited fairly patiently for her to cut their nest down before going bat-shit.
Yes, a branch swaying is different from smashing the nest open.
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valhalla13013 Dark Shield Perceives the GodsRegistered Userregular
I've had a very different history with literature it seems. I had read DIckens, Twain and Lewis as a child. I carried on with Tolkein, Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury in junior high and high school, and read practically everything of theirs and then moved to more advanced literature. When my classes in school read parts of Hamlet, Macbeth and Beowulf, I went an purchased the books and read the whole thing. Loved them. After high school, I got into "serious" reading, developed a love for history and read so much nonfiction it was amazing. I read some Clancy and other technothriller stuff, but that phase didn't last long. Clancy was better before he blew up, once I saw an interview with him on GMA or somesuch, and he was a complete ass, and I never read another of his books. All the while, I still kept reading "good" stuff.
As I grew older though, I found myself reading more and more escapist fiction. Now it's all I've read. I loved the Harry Potter books. I'm currently reading a ton of Warhammer 40,000 novels. It's all fun and I love the settings, and honestly, I've had enough of the real world and the human condition and learning about it.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
Edit: Also, wizards seem to be able to just shut off muggle tech, so they could just walk up to the tanks and do whatever they want. That's how a shoeless Ethiopian infantry defeated the entirety of a European nation's tanks, except replace "magic" with "the enemy being Italian."
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
Harry Potter having to stop the Death Eaters controlling the British military would have been a story I'd have been interested in reading.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I've had a very different history with literature it seems. I had read DIckens, Twain and Lewis as a child. I carried on with Tolkein, Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury in junior high and high school, and read practically everything of theirs and then moved to more advanced literature. When my classes in school read parts of Hamlet, Macbeth and Beowulf, I went an purchased the books and read the whole thing. Loved them. After high school, I got into "serious" reading, developed a love for history and read so much nonfiction it was amazing. I read some Clancy and other technothriller stuff, but that phase didn't last long. Clancy was better before he blew up, once I saw an interview with him on GMA or somesuch, and he was a complete ass, and I never read another of his books. All the while, I still kept reading "good" stuff.
As I grew older though, I found myself reading more and more escapist fiction. Now it's all I've read. I loved the Harry Potter books. I'm currently reading a ton of Warhammer 40,000 novels. It's all fun and I love the settings, and honestly, I've had enough of the real world and the human condition and learning about it.
Escapist fiction doesn't have to be bad, though, is the frustrating thing. It doesn't get much more escapist than Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, but they're also written with skill and wit and intelligence.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Owls? Really? In a world where email and cellphones exist?
Cars? Really? In a world where teenagers can apparate by the time they're finished high school?
The world evolved in parallel, with different rules and universal constants: the magical world doesn't have e-mail or cellular phones, and none of the infrastructure to support either of those things, just as the muggle world doesn't have any magic in it.
It would've been dumb for Rawling to suggest that both worlds would've developed similar trends in technology given how differently things work. If I can communicate with you telepathically, suddenly long-range communication and/or learning the intricacies of acoustics isn't a problem that someone like Bell needs to solve, so where's the source for innovation in communications technology?
The firearm talk is pretty laughable. Anyone who proposes armies full of snipers wearing invisibility cloaks hasn't read the books, and likewise for anyone suggesting that a projectile weapon obviously defeats any wizards or magical creatures.
It's already addressed the majority of the first part of your apologetics (specifically that the separation between the worlds is one way and wizards live with muggles, that the issue is more that the issue isn't brought up by those who should wonder, not that they weren't employed. The car thing doesn't really make sense as an argument).
The bolded part has been sort of unaddressed (though, I do not think it addresses the actual arguments). I don't know why we are to assume that firearms wouldn't defeat magical creatures having read the books so if you care to elaborate upon that, I am all ears.
I assume your issue with the invisibility cloak talk is the fact that the invisibility cloak is unique, being one of the Deathly Hallows, which I admit serves to explain why they are not deployed en masse. However the whole thing is a a house of cards which simply leads us straight back to wizards are stupid. The Invisibility cloak is entirely unique, of huge cultural significance and ostensibly one of the most powerful magical artifacts in existence. So, Dumbledore hands it over to a 12 year old boy with nothing more than a wink and a nod and absolutely no explanation but a friendly warning not to get into too much mischief? The cloak is sufficiently powerful to avoid detection by even death himself. Dumbledore doesn't even preface this with a retelling of the story of the Peverell brothers! An item which, should it fall into the wrong hands, be completely catastrophic! Sure the nature of the cloak might be sufficient to demonstrate that one particular offensive strategy is untenable, but it's really robbing Peter to pay Paul insofar as it being a strategy by which to defend the books against the charge that it relies on unstated fact that Wizards are Stupid.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Harry (and Hermione) not mentioning guns is a symptom of a larger problem. I can't recall either bringing up any Muggle technology to the wizards or attempting to find something useful with Muggle technology to get an edge over Voldemort at any time. They may have been young but they're not that isolated from Muggles to consider Muggle solutions "off the table".
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
I think that question, to a group of magical wizards, is probably akin to, "But how is that bulldozer going to deal with the mandibles of that ant it's trying to run over?"
It was demonstrated time and time again that neither muggles nor muggle technology is of any threat to a capable adult wizard. The British government was infiltrated by Aurors with little effort, the Death Eaters engaged in terror attacks against muggle cities, etc.
Anyway, I tend to think of writing as bad if it's technically sloppy, if the writer was lazy about constructing their plot devices or if the writer's ego is clearly driving the story rather than their desire to create a narrative experience. Twighlight is bad because it meets criteria 1 and 3, Hunger Games is bad because is meets criteria 2, Da Vinci Code is bad because it manages to score on all 3 categories. Harry Potter is not bad.
With Love and Courage
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
I think if obvious questions exist that could easily unravel the central conceits of the text, then yes, even if they're not relevant to the immediate plot and story they need to be explained to at least a modicum of detail.
If a wizard can be taken out by a sniper from distance, wouldn't that be helpful to know?
If the Capitol needed the resources from the Districts to survive, wouldn't that be important?
I don't care two shits about involving myself in some po-faced hypothetical fantasy if it can be undone by five seconds of rational thought.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Anyway, I tend to think of writing as bad if it's technically sloppy, if the writer was lazy about constructing their plot devices or if the writer's ego is clearly driving the story rather than their desire to create a narrative experience. Twighlight is bad because it meets criteria 1 and 3, Hunger Games is bad because is meets criteria 2, Da Vinci Code is bad because it manages to score on all 3 categories. Harry Potter is not bad.
Harry Potter fails your second test in just about every single book and movie.
Two of the worst books I have ever read are The Sun Also Rises and Heart of Darkness.
A common failure is characters who's motivations are incomprehensible. Or rather, they are simply never really explained.
In addition to that, The Sun Also Rises is just boring. Nothing fucking happens. All the characters in it are bored with their lives and I'm bored out of my mind reading about it. It's just pointless. It barely counts as a book given it's utter lack of anything resembling a narrative.
Heart of Darkness has a narrative. It's just completely unreadable. Most of the time I didn't even know what the fuck was going on. It's deliberately obtuse. Which is something that really grinds my gears, and on a related note being deliberately obtuse is a trope all too common in what could have otherwise been decent science fiction. Congratulations, you were clever enough to write a book that says nothing! Now fuck off.
The Scarlet Letter has already been mentioned. I'm sure it's not the first book to lack any substance beyond it's hamfisted moral and one note characters, but it certainly knows how to use improbable contrivance and irrational actions to drive a plot.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Well, there are two lines of criticism here:
1) Harry never asks any questions, in general, that someone intimately familiar with the mundane world might when introduced to the wizarding world might ask. This is a question of characterisation - the firearms issue is perhaps the most obvious example as it relates directly to Harry's concerns. He need not ask every such question, but he doesn't make any efforts in this regard. Which makes him a dunderhead and which makes him fail as a literary device (as the avatar familiar with our world through which we discover the wizarding world). Having him ask about firearms simply solves two questions at once.
2) When we're dealing a conflict in which the non-magical world will be enslaved or destroyed there are a whoooooole range of mechanisms by which to explore the ineffectiveness of mundane weaponry that would fit seamlessly into the storyline as it stands. Deatheaters attacking non-magical folk and military targets while bullets bounce harmlessly off of them, trained soldiers staring beatifically ahead having been obliviated and a Deatheater strolls past. They already attack muggles, why not put the scenes to work beyond simply "They eviling, look at the evils!"
A lot of the overall plotting and consistency issues with Harry Potter stem from Rowling's attempt to write an epic bildungsroman that matures along with its protagonist (and readers). As intention, it's ambitious, brilliant, and admirable. Her execution, however, was seriously lacking--whether she failed to plan things out in full or failed to deviate from that plan or failed to think through her deviations, I have no idea. But the results are characters whose personalities and motivations at the end don't track with their actions at the beginning, plot elements that mesh with one tone or the other but not both*, atmosphere and world-building that also work poorly with the tone they weren't created for**, and so on.
*Plot elements like the whimsical time-turner, which works well when your tone is "We've got to rescue the cute animal!" but creates huge problems when your tone is "My friends and family keep dying, IF ONLY I HAD SOME WAY TO UNDO THIS"; or the "Veil of Death" that works purely as metaphor, which is fine for book 5, but not for the series, which began with everything being very concrete and explicable.
**World-building elements like the whimsical ghosts of the first book, which works fine there as an introduction to MagicWorld but has to be handwaved away once the series begins grappling with death as a permanent consequence.
Arguably it has to be a failure of planning.
That's the only way to explain things like Wormtail being Ron's rat being hand waved for not attacking Harry on sight.He's a guy who is willing to kill a street full of people to frame someone else, but he won't kill an ignorant kid then disappear back up the ass of being a rat again because he was waiting for news of Voldemort coming back. Apparently him possessing Quirrell's head and opening the Chamber of Secrets again don't count, and it's not as if a willing accomplice would've made that whole Chamber thing easier to begin with, huh?
Or how you end up with things that can grow back your entire forearm's bones but still need glasses or how they've mastered Tardis technology (the pup tent that's like a sultan's palace inside) yet the Weasleys live in a bunch of shacks stacked together instead of in a gardening shed that opens onto a mansion.
I think it's also the rush of the books. It's how we get extended subplots like Hermione and the house elves that exists only to have Hermione not be a waste for book 4. Or Hagrid's little brother in book 5 which could have been excised with no detriment to the series.
Another thing I was thinking about was why would Voldemort's ideas about subjugating magical creatures be so bad? House elves are already subjugated and every other magical creature is shown to be completely awful in some way, like trolls being only stupid, goblins being irreparably greedy to the point of hurting themselves, most of the rest are incomprehensible and violent leaving us with the centaurs who simply disdain everyone who isn't a centaur.
Mad King George on
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Well, there are two lines of criticism here:
1) Harry never asks any questions, in general, that someone intimately familiar with the mundane world might when introduced to the wizarding world might ask. This is a question of characterisation - the firearms issue is perhaps the most obvious example as it relates directly to Harry's concerns. He need not ask every such question, but he doesn't make any efforts in this regard. Which makes him a dunderhead and which makes him fail as a literary device (as the avatar familiar with our world through which we discover the wizarding world). Having him ask about firearms simply solves two questions at once.
2) When we're dealing a conflict in which the non-magical world will be enslaved or destroyed there are a whoooooole range of mechanisms by which to explore the ineffectiveness of mundane weaponry that would fit seamlessly into the storyline as it stands. Deatheaters attacking non-magical folk and military targets while bullets bounce harmlessly off of them, trained soldiers staring beatifically ahead having been obliviated and a Deatheater strolls past. They already attack muggles, why not put the scenes to work beyond simply "They eviling, look at the evils!"
I would also add that a lot of conflict in modern entertainment tends to be related to the simple problem that two characters cannot communicate at a critical time - this has been the basis of a huge amount of fiction for aaaaaaaaaages. Mobile phones would have solved nearly every problem in every Poirot mystery for example. As such, we constantly see people separated from their mobile phones in meaningful ways in a huge amount of modern entertainment. It's not obtrusive, though it may be hackneyed., but you cannot deny its necessity.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Harry (and Hermione) not mentioning guns is a symptom of a larger problem. I can't recall either bringing up any Muggle technology to the wizards or attempting to find something useful with Muggle technology to get an edge over Voldemort at any time. They may have been young but they're not that isolated from Muggles to consider Muggle solutions "off the table".
In the first book they explain that Hogwarts' concentration of magic, and by extension places like the Ministry and Diagon Alley, disrupt electronics. Now, there's a whole range of technology that is mechanical and not electronic (pencils) but that was set up in the beginning.
Now, there is one reason that is in the books which I think explains, at least enough for me, why they don't have pencils and things. The separation between the muggle world and the magic world was centuries ago. There's no reason for wizard society to have advanced since necessity is the mother of invention and magic removes much of that necessity. I don't really need that spelled out to me in the books because that's a pretty basic idea.
Could Rowling have broached this, sure and I think it's perfectly fine to call her out on this, but that's why it doesn't really bother me.
For what it's worth, I think Harry should have asked about that sort of thing in the first few books. "Hey, my uncle's got this thing called a gun, what about that?" "Oh Harry, blah blah exposition blah" would've been pretty simple to add into the sorcerer's stone when they're trying to figure out how to fight who they think is Snape.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Heart of Darkness has a narrative. It's just completely unreadable. Most of the time I didn't even know what the fuck was going on. It's deliberately obtuse. Which is something that really grinds my gears, and on a related note being deliberately obtuse is a trope all too common in what could have otherwise been decent science fiction. Congratulations, you were clever enough to write a book that says nothing! Now fuck off.
Now, I'm going to disagree with you about the throughline of the book. It's very clearly (by the end) a commentary on the whole "staring at the abyss" trope. Kurtz becomes so accustomed to the horror he's witnessed that he can no longer be compelled to do anything active about it except retreat into a state of shock in which he is force to become the very thing that horrifies him.
But I will agree with you that it's a very obtuse and difficult book to chew through. Everything it tries to say is much better said by the film it was based upon, Apocalypse Now.
A lot of the overall plotting and consistency issues with Harry Potter stem from Rowling's attempt to write an epic bildungsroman that matures along with its protagonist (and readers). As intention, it's ambitious, brilliant, and admirable. Her execution, however, was seriously lacking--whether she failed to plan things out in full or failed to deviate from that plan or failed to think through her deviations, I have no idea. But the results are characters whose personalities and motivations at the end don't track with their actions at the beginning, plot elements that mesh with one tone or the other but not both*, atmosphere and world-building that also work poorly with the tone they weren't created for**, and so on.
*Plot elements like the whimsical time-turner, which works well when your tone is "We've got to rescue the cute animal!" but creates huge problems when your tone is "My friends and family keep dying, IF ONLY I HAD SOME WAY TO UNDO THIS"; or the "Veil of Death" that works purely as metaphor, which is fine for book 5, but not for the series, which began with everything being very concrete and explicable.
**World-building elements like the whimsical ghosts of the first book, which works fine there as an introduction to MagicWorld but has to be handwaved away once the series begins grappling with death as a permanent consequence.
Arguably it has to be a failure of planning.
That's the only way to explain things like Wormtail being Ron's rat being hand waved for not attacking Harry on sight.He's a guy who is willing to kill a street full of people to frame someone else, but he won't kill an ignorant kid then disappear back up the ass of being a rat again because he was waiting for news of Voldemort coming back. Apparently him possessing Quirrell's head and opening the Chamber of Secrets again don't count, and it's not as if a willing accomplice would've made that whole Chamber thing easier to begin with, huh?
I think it's also the rush of the books. It's how we get extended subplots like Hermione and the house elves that exists only to have Hermione not be a waste for book 4. Or Hagrid's little brother in book 5 which could have been excised with no detriment to the series.
Another thing I was thinking about was why would Voldemort's ideas about subjugating magical creatures be so bad? House elves are already subjugated and every other magical creature is shown to be completely awful in some way, like trolls being only stupid, goblins being irreparably greedy to the point of hurting themselves, most of the rest are incomprehensible and violent leaving us with the centaurs who simply disdain everyone who isn't a centaur.
Goblins are in no way treated as dangerously greedy. Houseelves being Slaves is not a good thing and is never depicted as one. Giants are stupid but seem to survive pretty ok.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Harry (and Hermione) not mentioning guns is a symptom of a larger problem. I can't recall either bringing up any Muggle technology to the wizards or attempting to find something useful with Muggle technology to get an edge over Voldemort at any time. They may have been young but they're not that isolated from Muggles to consider Muggle solutions "off the table".
I don't think Harry and Hermione not mentioning this is a plausibility failure -- consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions, then consider how desperately context-sensitive teens/tweens are, then consider how extra-desperate Harry is after escaping from his abusive Muggle home. People are stupid, not wizards. Still though, you'd expect somebody in the setting to think of it.
1) Harry never asks any questions, in general, that someone intimately familiar with the mundane world might when introduced to the wizarding world might ask. This is a question of characterisation - the firearms issue is perhaps the most obvious example as it relates directly to Harry's concerns. He need not ask every such question, but he doesn't make any efforts in this regard. Which makes him a dunderhead and which makes him fail as a literary device (as the avatar familiar with our world through which we discover the wizarding world). Having him ask about firearms simply solves two questions at once.
2) When we're dealing a conflict in which the non-magical world will be enslaved or destroyed there are a whoooooole range of mechanisms by which to explore the ineffectiveness of mundane weaponry that would fit seamlessly into the storyline as it stands. Deatheaters attacking non-magical folk and military targets while bullets bounce harmlessly off of them, trained soldiers staring beatifically ahead having been obliviated and a Deatheater strolls past. They already attack muggles, why not put the scenes to work beyond simply "They eviling, look at the evils!"
I believe part of the reason that guns were totally excluded from Harry Potter has to do with the UK censorship laws & BBFC.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions-
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
Yeah, that's one thing the series handles right (for most of it anyway). Harry is famous, but he's not a saviour. To most people, he's not supposed to do anything.
Dumbledore's the only one who knows and he keeps this information from Harry for reasons he makes clear at the end of book 5 (ie - he didn't want to burden a child with that knowledge).
It's actually a great little part of the series and helps show Dumbledore as something more then just the all-wise mentor figure he's clearly kinda based on.
Well, again I don't think this flies/helps for two reasons:
People other than Dumbledore have to have made the connection at the end of book one that there's something significant about Harry Potter when he melts Voldemort's face with his touch. Admittedly, a small handful of them.
Dumbleydore's stupid. There's a broken logic in not informing Harry and a complete distortion of priority - you have to be cruel to be kind, and when the stakes are as high as they are supposed to be, ensuring Harry is carefree is fairly ridiculous (especially when contrasted with the fact that nothing was done to concern themselves with Harry's mental health prior to this given that they left him in an explicitly abusive household without intervening in any way whatsoever until it was time for him to attend Hogwarts). Even if we accept that not wanting to burden him with the knowledge that he's the only one capable of destroying Voldemort is a worthwhile goal, this doesn't even begin to address the fact that Harry still needs to be brought up to speed and trained - he should have special tutors, he should have a crash course in the relevant bits and pieces of Wizarding history and magical theory. A lie to justify this would have been entirely plausible (and heightened the apparent tension of betrayal/concern with the reveal in book 5). Instead, Harry is a mediocre student and Dumbledore is content to see him waste time with Quidditch and concerns about inter-house competition.
It's not supposed to be seen as a perfectly wise and logical decision.
It's the sentimental decision of an old man to a young child he cares for.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
A lot of the overall plotting and consistency issues with Harry Potter stem from Rowling's attempt to write an epic bildungsroman that matures along with its protagonist (and readers). As intention, it's ambitious, brilliant, and admirable. Her execution, however, was seriously lacking--whether she failed to plan things out in full or failed to deviate from that plan or failed to think through her deviations, I have no idea. But the results are characters whose personalities and motivations at the end don't track with their actions at the beginning, plot elements that mesh with one tone or the other but not both*, atmosphere and world-building that also work poorly with the tone they weren't created for**, and so on.
*Plot elements like the whimsical time-turner, which works well when your tone is "We've got to rescue the cute animal!" but creates huge problems when your tone is "My friends and family keep dying, IF ONLY I HAD SOME WAY TO UNDO THIS"; or the "Veil of Death" that works purely as metaphor, which is fine for book 5, but not for the series, which began with everything being very concrete and explicable.
**World-building elements like the whimsical ghosts of the first book, which works fine there as an introduction to MagicWorld but has to be handwaved away once the series begins grappling with death as a permanent consequence.
Arguably it has to be a failure of planning.
That's the only way to explain things like Wormtail being Ron's rat being hand waved for not attacking Harry on sight.He's a guy who is willing to kill a street full of people to frame someone else, but he won't kill an ignorant kid then disappear back up the ass of being a rat again because he was waiting for news of Voldemort coming back. Apparently him possessing Quirrell's head and opening the Chamber of Secrets again don't count, and it's not as if a willing accomplice would've made that whole Chamber thing easier to begin with, huh?
I think it's also the rush of the books. It's how we get extended subplots like Hermione and the house elves that exists only to have Hermione not be a waste for book 4. Or Hagrid's little brother in book 5 which could have been excised with no detriment to the series.
Another thing I was thinking about was why would Voldemort's ideas about subjugating magical creatures be so bad? House elves are already subjugated and every other magical creature is shown to be completely awful in some way, like trolls being only stupid, goblins being irreparably greedy to the point of hurting themselves, most of the rest are incomprehensible and violent leaving us with the centaurs who simply disdain everyone who isn't a centaur.
Goblins are in no way treated as dangerously greedy. Houseelves being Slaves is not a good thing and is never depicted as one. Giants are stupid but seem to survive pretty ok.
Also Vampires seem pretty chill.
Wha?
The vast majority of wizards are 100% chill will house elves being subjugated, have a whole range of normative attitudes with regard to the behaviour of house elves and the suggestion that they should do as they wish and treat Hermoine is nothing more than a pest when she suggests that maybe House Elves should be free. This doesn't address the paucity of the mitigation that is "House Elves are happy being slaves!" that allows the pressing moral question to be staved off until Hermoine grows up. Wizards are, as a rule, not particularly worried about slavery.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
I don't consider anything I can work out for myself from the information given to be a plot hole. If the story involves someone known to frequent an area being seen in said area, I don't care whether he commuted by train or car. If a character is seen at the local grocery store, I don't need to know what's on the shopping list. Hell, I don't even know how a carburetor works, but it's abilities and function seem in line with out technology level (it reduces pollution at the expense of getting really fucking hot, right?). I really don't give a fuck how Grendal's family managed to get from the middle east to Denmark and how they procreated along the way despite being ugly fuckers (did the story say something about demons? it's been a while). Since they didn't have cars back then, I have to assume that the answer was the dominant source of transportation back then: the pogo stick.
This can be exceptionally annoying when it comes to science fiction since since we'd have the tech already if we knew how it works. At a certain point, I just shrug and decide "we've got one thousand years until the story takes place, we'll figure it out." Of course, H. G. Well explained this much more eloquently:
How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"
He also had a really nice answer to Verne asking to see the antigrav metal featured in The First Men in the Moon, but I can't find it.
You're missing the point. The issue isn't that "guns beat wizards", it's that not once in several thousand pages, did any of the characters who realistically ought to have thought about it, ask.
"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Harry (and Hermione) not mentioning guns is a symptom of a larger problem. I can't recall either bringing up any Muggle technology to the wizards or attempting to find something useful with Muggle technology to get an edge over Voldemort at any time. They may have been young but they're not that isolated from Muggles to consider Muggle solutions "off the table".
In the first book they explain that Hogwarts' concentration of magic, and by extension places like the Ministry and Diagon Alley, disrupt electronics. Now, there's a whole range of technology that is mechanical and not electronic (pencils) but that was set up in the beginning.
Now, there is one reason that is in the books which I think explains, at least enough for me, why they don't have pencils and things. The separation between the muggle world and the magic world was centuries ago. There's no reason for wizard society to have advanced since necessity is the mother of invention and magic removes much of that necessity. I don't really need that spelled out to me in the books because that's a pretty basic idea.
Could Rowling have broached this, sure and I think it's perfectly fine to call her out on this, but that's why it doesn't really bother me.
For what it's worth, I think Harry should have asked about that sort of thing in the first few books. "Hey, my uncle's got this thing called a gun, what about that?" "Oh Harry, blah blah exposition blah" would've been pretty simple to add into the sorcerer's stone when they're trying to figure out how to fight who they think is Snape.
Actually, the fate of that gun gives us a pretty good answer on why guns are never brought up again: the most incompetent wizard short of Neville thought that the threat of a gun was adorable.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions-
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
Alternatively: Would those who contend this also contend that the stories wouldn't be better if they were more consistent and coherent?
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions-
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
And just because people don't have a problem with something you have a problem doesn't make them "not very cognitive or literate". I'm the first one to argue that most people need to be better readers and thinkers, but come on man.
The vast majority of wizards are 100% chill will house elves being subjugated, have a whole range of normative attitudes with regard to the behaviour of house elves and the suggestion that they should do as they wish and treat Hermoine is nothing more than a pest when she suggests that maybe House Elves should be free. This doesn't address the paucity of the mitigation that is "House Elves are happy being slaves!" that allows the pressing moral question to be staved off until Hermoine grows up. Wizards are, as a rule, not particularly worried about slavery.
But Rowling is. Ron is representative of the wizarding world here, and everyone time it comes up, he is made to look like a prat, until the seventh book when he has learned his lesson about house elves (and thus, gets some). Rowling is never particularly subtle with her themes, and this is one of them.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Goblins are in no way treated as dangerously greedy. Houseelves being Slaves is not a good thing and is never depicted as one. Giants are stupid but seem to survive pretty ok.
Also Vampires seem pretty chill.
We don't even meet a vampire. There's one mentioned as being at a party.
And the goblins are dangerously, stupidly greedy. They want Gryffindor's sword back so badly, the only item that can destroy Voldemort's horcruxes, that they're pretty much willing to risk making sure the wizards cannot defeat the guy who is destroying their entire way of life and business and who will enslave them just to make sure they have it.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Yeah, that's one thing the series handles right (for most of it anyway). Harry is famous, but he's not a saviour. To most people, he's not supposed to do anything.
Dumbledore's the only one who knows and he keeps this information from Harry for reasons he makes clear at the end of book 5 (ie - he didn't want to burden a child with that knowledge).
It's actually a great little part of the series and helps show Dumbledore as something more then just the all-wise mentor figure he's clearly kinda based on.
Well, again I don't think this flies/helps for two reasons:
People other than Dumbledore have to have made the connection at the end of book one that there's something significant about Harry Potter when he melts Voldemort's face with his touch. Admittedly, a small handful of them.
Dumbleydore's stupid. There's a broken logic in not informing Harry and a complete distortion of priority - you have to be cruel to be kind, and when the stakes are as high as they are supposed to be, ensuring Harry is carefree is fairly ridiculous (especially when contrasted with the fact that nothing was done to concern themselves with Harry's mental health prior to this given that they left him in an explicitly abusive household without intervening in any way whatsoever until it was time for him to attend Hogwarts). Even if we accept that not wanting to burden him with the knowledge that he's the only one capable of destroying Voldemort is a worthwhile goal, this doesn't even begin to address the fact that Harry still needs to be brought up to speed and trained - he should have special tutors, he should have a crash course in the relevant bits and pieces of Wizarding history and magical theory. A lie to justify this would have been entirely plausible (and heightened the apparent tension of betrayal/concern with the reveal in book 5). Instead, Harry is a mediocre student and Dumbledore is content to see him waste time with Quidditch and concerns about inter-house competition.
It's not supposed to be seen as a perfectly wise and logical decision.
It's the sentimental decision of an old man to a young child he cares for.
I guess, but I think that only half answers the question. Like, Dumbledore only cares enough to stop him worrying about having to fight Voldemort? Not to intervene in the case of 12 years of child abuse? Not enough to put actual effort into preparing Harry for things to come (even if he does so while deceiving him as to why?
consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions-
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
Dunno -- I'm not arguing that the world is sound, just that it's not a characterization issue for two star-struck kids. Based on my experience with the shoddiness of humans (not "lots of people who aren't very cognitive," but "lots of people, who aren't very cognitive"), I would straight-up not expect Harry or Hermione to start Muggling it up in Hogwarts. I know when I was in high-school, a lot of obvious solutions seemed obviously totally off-limits. You are right about the setting, but over-reaching by making it a characterization failure.
The vast majority of wizards are 100% chill will house elves being subjugated, have a whole range of normative attitudes with regard to the behaviour of house elves and the suggestion that they should do as they wish and treat Hermoine is nothing more than a pest when she suggests that maybe House Elves should be free. This doesn't address the paucity of the mitigation that is "House Elves are happy being slaves!" that allows the pressing moral question to be staved off until Hermoine grows up. Wizards are, as a rule, not particularly worried about slavery.
Yes, but that's the whole point: the wizarding world doesn't care about the fate of the house elves or the morality of keeping them as slaves, but Hermione (one of the protagonists that the reader is supposed to be identifying with) does care, and when she challenges the status quo, the status quo can't defeat her rhetorically.
Sometimes, everyone is wrong and does the wrong thing. So don't trust in consensus alone.
consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions-
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
How about you include the whole quote, Mr. Romney.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Goblins are in no way treated as dangerously greedy. Houseelves being Slaves is not a good thing and is never depicted as one. Giants are stupid but seem to survive pretty ok.
Also Vampires seem pretty chill.
We don't even meet a vampire. There's one mentioned as being at a party.
And the goblins are dangerously, stupidly greedy. They want Gryffindor's sword back so badly, the only item that can destroy Voldemort's horcruxes, that they're pretty much willing to risk making sure the wizards cannot defeat the guy who is destroying their entire way of life and business and who will enslave them just to make sure they have it.
A Goblin is like that, and the Goblins aren't any more xenophobic and selfish than the wizards.
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"If Voldemort is going after non-wizards, too, how is he going to deal with muggle military?"
"Combat wizards have a Charm that absorbs and redirects a certain fraction of all kinetic energy of objects that approach them above a certain speed. It's why you can punch a wizard, but bullets never seem to hit. Also explains why so few wizards get hit by cars."
That's all it would have taken.
Of course, a lot of those can be combined. For example, being trapped in a tree kind of requires assailants to be below you, and there's nothing indicating that humans are immune to fatigue in the future.
And that last bit is wrong and makes me wonder if you were paying attention to the movie.
What, about the wasps?
Katniss certainly wasn't bothered by them to the extent the others (who died) were. The wasps waited fairly patiently for her to cut their nest down before going bat-shit.
Yes, a branch swaying is different from smashing the nest open.
As I grew older though, I found myself reading more and more escapist fiction. Now it's all I've read. I loved the Harry Potter books. I'm currently reading a ton of Warhammer 40,000 novels. It's all fun and I love the settings, and honestly, I've had enough of the real world and the human condition and learning about it.
Another tactic Voldomort had in his arsenal was to brainwash or control the Muggle military with spells. His biggest strength against the Muggle society is through subtly, not violence.
The slow knife defeats the shield...
And, really, do you want to be spoon fed shit that doesn't really matter to the plot, or do you want a story?
Edit: Also, wizards seem to be able to just shut off muggle tech, so they could just walk up to the tanks and do whatever they want. That's how a shoeless Ethiopian infantry defeated the entirety of a European nation's tanks, except replace "magic" with "the enemy being Italian."
Harry Potter having to stop the Death Eaters controlling the British military would have been a story I'd have been interested in reading.
You seem to be quite intent on your insistence that plots don't require consistency and logic.
I'm sure you're not surprised that I strongly disagree.
And you're pretty set on having every single question that could possibly pop up explained to you in a text. Is it a plot hole that Harry doesn't ask about muggle weapons and the muggle world and Hermione doesn't go "Oh Harry, have you never read Magical Warfare and the Muggle Mind where it clearly states X,Y,Zed?" Possibly, maybe even probably, but it also doesn't really address the core of the series. Time turners are more applicable, but then in Book Five all the time turners are destroyed (which I think is Rowling saying Fuck I wish I hadn't invented that).
There are really problems to talk about here, why we didn't see Voldemort versus the TA isn't really one of them.
Escapist fiction doesn't have to be bad, though, is the frustrating thing. It doesn't get much more escapist than Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, but they're also written with skill and wit and intelligence.
It's already addressed the majority of the first part of your apologetics (specifically that the separation between the worlds is one way and wizards live with muggles, that the issue is more that the issue isn't brought up by those who should wonder, not that they weren't employed. The car thing doesn't really make sense as an argument).
The bolded part has been sort of unaddressed (though, I do not think it addresses the actual arguments). I don't know why we are to assume that firearms wouldn't defeat magical creatures having read the books so if you care to elaborate upon that, I am all ears.
I assume your issue with the invisibility cloak talk is the fact that the invisibility cloak is unique, being one of the Deathly Hallows, which I admit serves to explain why they are not deployed en masse. However the whole thing is a a house of cards which simply leads us straight back to wizards are stupid. The Invisibility cloak is entirely unique, of huge cultural significance and ostensibly one of the most powerful magical artifacts in existence. So, Dumbledore hands it over to a 12 year old boy with nothing more than a wink and a nod and absolutely no explanation but a friendly warning not to get into too much mischief? The cloak is sufficiently powerful to avoid detection by even death himself. Dumbledore doesn't even preface this with a retelling of the story of the Peverell brothers! An item which, should it fall into the wrong hands, be completely catastrophic! Sure the nature of the cloak might be sufficient to demonstrate that one particular offensive strategy is untenable, but it's really robbing Peter to pay Paul insofar as it being a strategy by which to defend the books against the charge that it relies on unstated fact that Wizards are Stupid.
Harry (and Hermione) not mentioning guns is a symptom of a larger problem. I can't recall either bringing up any Muggle technology to the wizards or attempting to find something useful with Muggle technology to get an edge over Voldemort at any time. They may have been young but they're not that isolated from Muggles to consider Muggle solutions "off the table".
I think that question, to a group of magical wizards, is probably akin to, "But how is that bulldozer going to deal with the mandibles of that ant it's trying to run over?"
It was demonstrated time and time again that neither muggles nor muggle technology is of any threat to a capable adult wizard. The British government was infiltrated by Aurors with little effort, the Death Eaters engaged in terror attacks against muggle cities, etc.
Anyway, I tend to think of writing as bad if it's technically sloppy, if the writer was lazy about constructing their plot devices or if the writer's ego is clearly driving the story rather than their desire to create a narrative experience. Twighlight is bad because it meets criteria 1 and 3, Hunger Games is bad because is meets criteria 2, Da Vinci Code is bad because it manages to score on all 3 categories. Harry Potter is not bad.
I think if obvious questions exist that could easily unravel the central conceits of the text, then yes, even if they're not relevant to the immediate plot and story they need to be explained to at least a modicum of detail.
If a wizard can be taken out by a sniper from distance, wouldn't that be helpful to know?
If the Capitol needed the resources from the Districts to survive, wouldn't that be important?
I don't care two shits about involving myself in some po-faced hypothetical fantasy if it can be undone by five seconds of rational thought.
Harry Potter fails your second test in just about every single book and movie.
A common failure is characters who's motivations are incomprehensible. Or rather, they are simply never really explained.
In addition to that, The Sun Also Rises is just boring. Nothing fucking happens. All the characters in it are bored with their lives and I'm bored out of my mind reading about it. It's just pointless. It barely counts as a book given it's utter lack of anything resembling a narrative.
Heart of Darkness has a narrative. It's just completely unreadable. Most of the time I didn't even know what the fuck was going on. It's deliberately obtuse. Which is something that really grinds my gears, and on a related note being deliberately obtuse is a trope all too common in what could have otherwise been decent science fiction. Congratulations, you were clever enough to write a book that says nothing! Now fuck off.
The Scarlet Letter has already been mentioned. I'm sure it's not the first book to lack any substance beyond it's hamfisted moral and one note characters, but it certainly knows how to use improbable contrivance and irrational actions to drive a plot.
Well, there are two lines of criticism here:
1) Harry never asks any questions, in general, that someone intimately familiar with the mundane world might when introduced to the wizarding world might ask. This is a question of characterisation - the firearms issue is perhaps the most obvious example as it relates directly to Harry's concerns. He need not ask every such question, but he doesn't make any efforts in this regard. Which makes him a dunderhead and which makes him fail as a literary device (as the avatar familiar with our world through which we discover the wizarding world). Having him ask about firearms simply solves two questions at once.
2) When we're dealing a conflict in which the non-magical world will be enslaved or destroyed there are a whoooooole range of mechanisms by which to explore the ineffectiveness of mundane weaponry that would fit seamlessly into the storyline as it stands. Deatheaters attacking non-magical folk and military targets while bullets bounce harmlessly off of them, trained soldiers staring beatifically ahead having been obliviated and a Deatheater strolls past. They already attack muggles, why not put the scenes to work beyond simply "They eviling, look at the evils!"
Arguably it has to be a failure of planning.
That's the only way to explain things like Wormtail being Ron's rat being hand waved for not attacking Harry on sight.He's a guy who is willing to kill a street full of people to frame someone else, but he won't kill an ignorant kid then disappear back up the ass of being a rat again because he was waiting for news of Voldemort coming back. Apparently him possessing Quirrell's head and opening the Chamber of Secrets again don't count, and it's not as if a willing accomplice would've made that whole Chamber thing easier to begin with, huh?
Or how you end up with things that can grow back your entire forearm's bones but still need glasses or how they've mastered Tardis technology (the pup tent that's like a sultan's palace inside) yet the Weasleys live in a bunch of shacks stacked together instead of in a gardening shed that opens onto a mansion.
I think it's also the rush of the books. It's how we get extended subplots like Hermione and the house elves that exists only to have Hermione not be a waste for book 4. Or Hagrid's little brother in book 5 which could have been excised with no detriment to the series.
Another thing I was thinking about was why would Voldemort's ideas about subjugating magical creatures be so bad? House elves are already subjugated and every other magical creature is shown to be completely awful in some way, like trolls being only stupid, goblins being irreparably greedy to the point of hurting themselves, most of the rest are incomprehensible and violent leaving us with the centaurs who simply disdain everyone who isn't a centaur.
I would also add that a lot of conflict in modern entertainment tends to be related to the simple problem that two characters cannot communicate at a critical time - this has been the basis of a huge amount of fiction for aaaaaaaaaages. Mobile phones would have solved nearly every problem in every Poirot mystery for example. As such, we constantly see people separated from their mobile phones in meaningful ways in a huge amount of modern entertainment. It's not obtrusive, though it may be hackneyed., but you cannot deny its necessity.
In the first book they explain that Hogwarts' concentration of magic, and by extension places like the Ministry and Diagon Alley, disrupt electronics. Now, there's a whole range of technology that is mechanical and not electronic (pencils) but that was set up in the beginning.
Now, there is one reason that is in the books which I think explains, at least enough for me, why they don't have pencils and things. The separation between the muggle world and the magic world was centuries ago. There's no reason for wizard society to have advanced since necessity is the mother of invention and magic removes much of that necessity. I don't really need that spelled out to me in the books because that's a pretty basic idea.
Could Rowling have broached this, sure and I think it's perfectly fine to call her out on this, but that's why it doesn't really bother me.
For what it's worth, I think Harry should have asked about that sort of thing in the first few books. "Hey, my uncle's got this thing called a gun, what about that?" "Oh Harry, blah blah exposition blah" would've been pretty simple to add into the sorcerer's stone when they're trying to figure out how to fight who they think is Snape.
Now, I'm going to disagree with you about the throughline of the book. It's very clearly (by the end) a commentary on the whole "staring at the abyss" trope. Kurtz becomes so accustomed to the horror he's witnessed that he can no longer be compelled to do anything active about it except retreat into a state of shock in which he is force to become the very thing that horrifies him.
But I will agree with you that it's a very obtuse and difficult book to chew through. Everything it tries to say is much better said by the film it was based upon, Apocalypse Now.
Goblins are in no way treated as dangerously greedy. Houseelves being Slaves is not a good thing and is never depicted as one. Giants are stupid but seem to survive pretty ok.
Also Vampires seem pretty chill.
I don't think Harry and Hermione not mentioning this is a plausibility failure -- consider how many adults read Harry Potter without asking these questions, then consider how desperately context-sensitive teens/tweens are, then consider how extra-desperate Harry is after escaping from his abusive Muggle home. People are stupid, not wizards. Still though, you'd expect somebody in the setting to think of it.
They didn't solely. They also had the ability to talk through a fireplace by somehow floo-powdering their face.
Though how they learnt to talk by shoving their faces into fireplaces must remain a mystery with a horrifying background.
I believe part of the reason that guns were totally excluded from Harry Potter has to do with the UK censorship laws & BBFC.
I think the poorness of this line of argument should be obvious.
Just because lots of people who aren't very cognitive or literate don't have problems with reading shoddy literature doesn't somehow justify its shoddiness.
It's not supposed to be seen as a perfectly wise and logical decision.
It's the sentimental decision of an old man to a young child he cares for.
Wha?
The vast majority of wizards are 100% chill will house elves being subjugated, have a whole range of normative attitudes with regard to the behaviour of house elves and the suggestion that they should do as they wish and treat Hermoine is nothing more than a pest when she suggests that maybe House Elves should be free. This doesn't address the paucity of the mitigation that is "House Elves are happy being slaves!" that allows the pressing moral question to be staved off until Hermoine grows up. Wizards are, as a rule, not particularly worried about slavery.
I don't consider anything I can work out for myself from the information given to be a plot hole. If the story involves someone known to frequent an area being seen in said area, I don't care whether he commuted by train or car. If a character is seen at the local grocery store, I don't need to know what's on the shopping list. Hell, I don't even know how a carburetor works, but it's abilities and function seem in line with out technology level (it reduces pollution at the expense of getting really fucking hot, right?). I really don't give a fuck how Grendal's family managed to get from the middle east to Denmark and how they procreated along the way despite being ugly fuckers (did the story say something about demons? it's been a while). Since they didn't have cars back then, I have to assume that the answer was the dominant source of transportation back then: the pogo stick.
This can be exceptionally annoying when it comes to science fiction since since we'd have the tech already if we knew how it works. At a certain point, I just shrug and decide "we've got one thousand years until the story takes place, we'll figure it out." Of course, H. G. Well explained this much more eloquently: He also had a really nice answer to Verne asking to see the antigrav metal featured in The First Men in the Moon, but I can't find it.
Actually, the fate of that gun gives us a pretty good answer on why guns are never brought up again: the most incompetent wizard short of Neville thought that the threat of a gun was adorable.
Alternatively: Would those who contend this also contend that the stories wouldn't be better if they were more consistent and coherent?
And just because people don't have a problem with something you have a problem doesn't make them "not very cognitive or literate". I'm the first one to argue that most people need to be better readers and thinkers, but come on man.
But Rowling is. Ron is representative of the wizarding world here, and everyone time it comes up, he is made to look like a prat, until the seventh book when he has learned his lesson about house elves (and thus, gets some). Rowling is never particularly subtle with her themes, and this is one of them.
We don't even meet a vampire. There's one mentioned as being at a party.
And the goblins are dangerously, stupidly greedy. They want Gryffindor's sword back so badly, the only item that can destroy Voldemort's horcruxes, that they're pretty much willing to risk making sure the wizards cannot defeat the guy who is destroying their entire way of life and business and who will enslave them just to make sure they have it.
I guess, but I think that only half answers the question. Like, Dumbledore only cares enough to stop him worrying about having to fight Voldemort? Not to intervene in the case of 12 years of child abuse? Not enough to put actual effort into preparing Harry for things to come (even if he does so while deceiving him as to why?
Dunno -- I'm not arguing that the world is sound, just that it's not a characterization issue for two star-struck kids. Based on my experience with the shoddiness of humans (not "lots of people who aren't very cognitive," but "lots of people, who aren't very cognitive"), I would straight-up not expect Harry or Hermione to start Muggling it up in Hogwarts. I know when I was in high-school, a lot of obvious solutions seemed obviously totally off-limits. You are right about the setting, but over-reaching by making it a characterization failure.
Yes, but that's the whole point: the wizarding world doesn't care about the fate of the house elves or the morality of keeping them as slaves, but Hermione (one of the protagonists that the reader is supposed to be identifying with) does care, and when she challenges the status quo, the status quo can't defeat her rhetorically.
Sometimes, everyone is wrong and does the wrong thing. So don't trust in consensus alone.
That's the narrative.
How about you include the whole quote, Mr. Romney.
A Goblin is like that, and the Goblins aren't any more xenophobic and selfish than the wizards.