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)
There’s nothing wrong with the magic system because there’s always a reasonable setup and payoff for what can be done with magic and solutions never come out of nowhere as some deus ex machina. The magic system the stories had worked perfectly fine for the stories that were being told. Not every magic system has to be some stupid overly explained BS that takes all of the actual wonder and “magic” out of it.
Rowling is a piece of shit terf but you Sanderson cultists are still so fucking annoying. There’s more to magic in storytelling than just the exact, specific mechanics of how it works. Read Earthsea.
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
The wizards series of the discworld books are by far my favourite, but for exactly the reason you’ve set out. (Similarly with the witches)
The dialogue between the faculty is so believable and so stupifyingly inane and political that it’s hard to say that anything is more probable.
Anyone actually interested in how magic works gets ignored and all that really matters is where the next good meal is coming from.
Just one of the countless reasons that Terry pratchett is a gem of an author.
Rincewind isn’t useless at most things, he’s only useless at magic.
Esk is actually able to use magic to solve problems, because she’s a precocious child and also female.
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.
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
My issue is honestly just the inconsistency of when spells would work or wouldn’t. That and the fact that many dangerous situations could have been ended immediately if they used a spell they knew. I watched the movies and was yelling at the screen to use a certain spell to solve the situation but they just run away scared and helpless.
I mean, it isnt quite juvenile fiction, but it’s a series of books about kids. Having the magic system being simple makes sense.
Harry Potter’s magic system isn’t simple.
Agree to disagree.
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.
What is this post even? One of the main plot points of one of the books was about how the students are so engaged that they made an underground secret class to study and learn.
Harry literally stays up all night studying his books during summer break in the earlier years, the book describes how it’s all he can think about. (before schooling became a lower priority due to the active war).
There are always going to be boring classes, and the book describes that even Hermione is bored in some of them, but typically the students are always engaged, it’s clear that Hermione is a hard worker with doctor parents that expect a lot from her, not that she is some hyper genius.
Harry is a rich jock and a literal child, he is the common trope of the school athlete that slacks in classes occasionally and likes trouble making.
I think it’s very clear that the students were generally engaged in engaging classes with good teachers (hagrids classes, PE / flying, defense against the dark arts, the gardening class with the screaming plants), disengaged in classes that would have equivalent perceptions of boringness (history of magic).
Just like all the worst real-world school subjects, her magic system isn’t something with a logic you can learn to understand, it’s something arbitrary you have to memorize. These poor kids are out here taking the equivalent of anatomy classes all day (why is that bone called the tibia? Don’t worry about it, just memorize it).
Even AHS Coven had more interesting magic than Hairy Pooper
I like how Patrick Rothfuss wrote about “magic” in his Kingkiller Chronicle… I think it was explicitly called something else (been years since I read the books), but it was pretty fucking cool.
It was like daoist in nature almost, if I remember correctly.
That guy had at least three magic systems going at once. It was a lot.
There was sympathy, which was kind of like voodoo dolls and also sometimes casting from hit points? Sygildry or something which was programming with magic runes. And Naming, which I believe was like grokking something so well you could just command it to do whatever.
NECROMANCY!?
I’m a member of the College of Winterhold, In good stead.
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.
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
Damn, you must take some pretty long showers!
In Sanderson’s super school book, there are 10 kids and only one of them is uninterested in piloting spacefighters. But he is interested in engineering, so he’s still able to be a big nerd about the book’s subject matter. Everyone else is either a great pilot who likes piloting, or fucking dies in a tragic scheme emphasising the brutality and pointlessness of war.
Sanderson doesn’t write characters who just drift along without an interest in anything, because Sanderson writes books about topics that he makes interesting.
Rowling is only able to create characters who think Divination or History of Magic are boring, because she makes them boring. Sometimes on purpose!
Rowling was writing about grade school kids going to school. Grade school kids get bored at school. If they live in a world where everyone uses magic and it’s not that special they’re going to get bored of learning about magic sometimes. It’s like if in grade school our teachers spent a bunch of time teaching us how to use computers, phones, and other technological devices. Sometimes it would be cool and interesting and a lot of the time it would be pretty damn boring.
Plus Rowling wanted the grade school kids reading her books to relate to her characters, so she gave her characters a schooling experience they could relate to. And as much as I hate Rowling, there’s something inherently kind of comedic about a bunch of kids being bored silly learning about magic because it’s something that seems like it should be exciting to us, the reader.
The boredom of the characters isn’t a failure of the writing or magic system, it works perfectly well for its intended effect.
Rowling is a fucking idiot.
I think magic went through a dark age in the HP universe, where all the words that were imbued with power were done so aeons ago, and then that knowledge of how they came to be was lost, with only a few handful having been rediscovered in the modern era.
Exceptions like “Point me” might just be english analogs of existing spells, rather than new inventions.
I’m currently going though the books and from what I can tell, Harry especially takes issues with some teachers. He hates history and doesn’t understand divination but he’s fine with charms, defense against the dark arts and even potions once Snape no longer teaches it.
It’s just that during the lessons she describes, they usually have stuff like Quidditch or Voldemort stuff going on so they don’t really pay attention. They also don’t like doing homework so they let Hermione do it for them. And they still did pretty well on the OWLs so all in all, I think they were fine with class but by and large, she just doesn’t really write about classes that went their regular course.
Or they’re just lazy? 🤔
Not any more than your average school kid I’d say. There are many subjects that are or can be interesting that are thought in schools, but can be taught in the most boring way. They enjoyed DADA with Lupin quite much for example.
There are also other subjects not related to practicing magic directly.
Yeah, book 3 is the one where Rowling made an effort to delve into the workings of the magic system. The Patronus is the only spell we actually learn how to cast. (No, levio-sah doesn’t count). The time turner has limitations which allow Rowling to tell an interesting story with it.
Rowling made magic interesting for one book, and Harry became interested in magic.
Then she changed her mind.
