• EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Literally could have happened in Harry Potter. It actually drove me crazy. There were two separate times in the series that she made it abundantly clear that the average wizard doesn’t even know what a gun is let alone how dangerous it can be.

    I’m willing to bet Protego would stop a bullet but the average wizard wouldn’t even try because they would just be laughing at the silly little muggle pointing a piece of metal at them.

      • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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        11 months ago

        This could quickly be explained away as a contingent spell that specifically stops common muggle weapons.

        The one moment that really irks me in the concept of wizard wars is a moment in deathly hallows. The gang are captured in Malfoy Manor and Harry manages to grab 3 wands from Draco Malfoy’s hand, and casts stupify on Fenrir Greyback, who is hit with thrice the intensity and fucking basically dies.

        If this works why aren’t wizards rocking bundles of wands, let’s see Harry use expeliarmus to counter Voldie’s wizard wand Gatling gun of avada kedavra, or a bundle of wands casting sectumsempura and fucking turning a wizard to mince.

        Wanna hit me with the torture curse you wizard nerd? I’ll just use my bundle of sticks, my wand strap to Wingardium Leviosa you straight into the sun.

        • x4740N@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Also the thing with multiple wands doesn’t seem fully explored

          Maybe there are potential drawbacks

          There’s also the logistics of multiple wands and how could that be optimised,

          would packing multiple cores into one wand achieve the same effect, or would it damage the wand ?

          And I assume more wizards haven’t tried to wand thing due to arrogance and being stuck in the past

          • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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            11 months ago

            I’m not really a fan of the writing of Harry Potter, it often falls into a trap of being a mystery adventure where the puzzles are then trivialised by magic which seems forgotten next time it would be applicable, and I like to try to race the characters to solutions which you can’t really do in this format.

            I’d love to write a TV show in the harry potter universe starring a squib (someone incapable of having magical powers who knows if the wizarding world) running a mundane repair shop for wizards in London near Diagon Alley. They’d basically be losing their minds at the regular cast of wizards being upsettingly inefficient and naive with their magical potential, while also running this repair shop for them that looks more like an antiques shop. It would definitely explore these questions as the protagonist pins down their wizard friends and makes them do multiple wand tests etc. The whole show would lovingly poke fun at the unanswered questions and plot holes of the Harry Potter universe and consistently paint the wizards as lovable but arrogant goofs who never had a proper education past 11 years old.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Duck-foot pistol, but it’s just a lollipop stand loaded with Ollivander’s factory seconds. It’d almost look like a toy broom until it sweeps an entire squad.

          Whatever you say is Latin for “fuck everyone in this general direction.”

        • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I’ll just use my bundle of sticks, my wand strap to Wingardium Leviosa you straight into the sun.

          I wish he did this. This is Gold!

          • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            The books. he picks up 3 wands, uses the stunner spell, and the spell blasts greyback so hard he literally flies up and smashes into the ceiling. the ceiling in the entrance hall of a huge mansion so it had to be very high.

        • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          In the books, wands aren’t just objects. They have a degree of sentience and therefore can conceivably rebel against the user. I imagined there is a compatibility issue with using multiple wands at once that may have been temporarily suspended when Harry used them on Fenrir. Might be cause the wands hated Fenrir too or liked Harry enough to let that one spell go. I don’t know. But in my own head canon the use of multiple wands is untenable because it just doesn’t work out and the wizard is more likely to explode themselves that fire off a good powerful spell and Harry, as always, just has really good fucking luck.

        • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Wands don’t generate mana / magical energy. Wizards do. The wands are just efficient at chanelling it in a single beam. So if you use multiple wands together, you sacrifice staying power for firepower. Which means if you miss, you’ll take longer to recharge, and meanwhile you are a sitting duck.

          • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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            11 months ago

            One thing I don’t really ever coming across in the harry potter books were people being exhausted by powerful spells, perhaps I just can’t remember a case where that happens.

            It’s always portrayed that you need a base magical ability and then from then all it’s all knowhow.

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              Hmm you’re right. But the hours-long duel Dumbledore had with Grindelwald is mentioned as something only he could do. So it might be that magical energy is limited, but you’d need to be casting spells for more than an hour or so for it to start having an effect.

      • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        True but in my mind I’m always picturing something like a mugging? Where they don’t know they’re up against a wizard? So then you run into the same problem but from the other angle. The muggle wouldn’t think twice about giving the wizard time to say the word protego

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      In the D20 season Misfits & Magic they call this sort of thing out, where Brennan’s character mentions nukes, the wizard has no idea what they are, and he’s like, “You gotta know. You gotta know what nukes are.”

      • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Yeah that’s another huge thing that bugged me. I doubt wizards know muggles have world ending technology. And I refuse to believe they have a spell thats gonna stand up to a nuke.

        • Blyfh@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          In one of the Fantastical Beasts movies there is mention of atomic bombs in some visions and they see it as a major threat. So it’s kinda canon that some non-muggles know about nukes.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      The somewhat regrettable fanfic Methods Of Rationality has Quirrel pull a fucking uzi on Harry. Totally reasonable for a well-traveled megalomaniac to have in his robes. A tool for every occasion.

      • JoJo
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        11 months ago

        Fucking what

        I was about to mention here A Study In Magic, a Sherlock x HP crossover that actually doesn’t suck, where this shit is mentioned, but MOR had a fucking uzi appear like this???

        I couldn’t get into MOR, and now I’m even more conflicted wether I should read it or not

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          When Harry meets Hermoine he tells her to name all the quarks or else she’s an NPC.

          Which is intense whiplash from the previous chapter, where politely asking Draco to describe the Death Eaters’ whole deal has him ticking off rhetorical beats for plain old fascism.

          Basically, the Less Wrong guy wrote a full Harry Potter novel, and it is exactly what you’d expect. Some aspects are fantastic! Others… yikes.

          A detail I love that’s not a spoiler: Crabbe and Goyle are well-characterized to act exactly the way they are in canon. They’ve been molded as bodyguards since they were little, and now they’re in wizard middle school getting to play tough-guy bruisers on Draco’s behalf, so of course they’re tryhard doofuses that he finds mildly embarrassing. But when Quirrel invites one of them to spar, demonstrating the ancient mystical defense known as… judo… Goyle quietly asks what belt he has. Quirrel says “seventh dan.” The tough-guy act comes right back up, and Goyle throws himself into it, because he knows he’s about to get his ass kicked, safely.

          The whole thing is ultimately about modeling people on these layers of facade. A lot of it gets overly analytical and kinda up-its-own-ass. Certain characters call that out and condemn actions at face value, so some of it’s deliberate writing for the protagonist and antagonist. But only some.

          Even with abundant benefit of the doubt, figuring ‘this guy wrote Harry like a know-it-all child,’ any recommendation would be complicated.

          • JoJo
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            11 months ago

            Okay that judo stuff is fucking amazing

            This is why I love fanfic

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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    11 months ago

    Rowling was great for branding, but not good for internally consistent worldbuilding. Hogwarts has anti-tech wards, but its never specified whether a Glock 9, a Bic rollerball, A CANON EOS 35MM, or a TI-84 Graphing Calculator would work. Each of them work based on widely differing physical mechanics. Are they independently warded, or are they waved away by the category tech?

    The common consensus regarding the HP books as they are is that in a muggle war, the international community would quickly dominate, and magical secrets would fall into the hands of billionaires like Bezos and Musk, who could muster far greater cruelty and misery than Voldemort’s ambitions, all in the name of profit.

    The reason there’s a codefied masquerade is to keep magic exclusively in the hands of less creative more sensible minds.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        10 months ago

        I remember in Prisoner of Azkaban the anti-tech field around Hogwarts was briefly mentioned, though much ado was made over Arthur Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia which he wasn’t supposed to enchant but totally did. Arthur’s department in the MoM is about regulating intersections between magic and tech, which implies there are problems that require legal prohibitions. My read is the laws are overly harsh and not well enforced, except when the state or some official wants to make someone go away.

        That said, again, Rowling wasn’t great at consistency in the canon, so it remains up to the writer if and how electronics might be affected by ensorcellments, and how they might be integrated.

  • Neato@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    As a reader of a certain web serial, watching her deal with not being an innate magic user by using spell cards was very fun. That world didn’t know what hit them.

      • Neato@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Ah sorry. I try to not appear like I’m advertising. It’s Pale by Wildbow which just finished. Modern fantasy with 3 girls as protagonists. Rituals, other-than-human creatures and spell cards are a big part of the magic system.

        • Sekoia
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          11 months ago

          Dammit, I really need to read the rest of Wildbow. I only read Worm. Is the one after Worm any good, or are the other series better?

          I have so much to reeaad…

          • Xariphon@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            I couldn’t get through Ward mostly because I fucking hate Victoria Dallon and couldn’t stand her as a main character.

          • Neato@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            I’ve read them all and liked them all. They all feel quite different.

            Pact is urban fantasy about a protagonist dealt the shittiest hand and dealing with that. It gets pretty dark but I really like the world it creates.

            Twig is about kids at an academy in a world where alchemy and biology took off. To the point where grade schoolers creating Frankenstein’s Monster would be a class project. It deals with flawed characters in a really unique world.

            Ward is the sequel to Worm staring a very traumatized Glory Girl. Imo it’s about healing and dealing with trauma and forgiveness. It’s the toughest of Wildbow’s works in part because he got a LOT of negativity during this that made writing harder. But I liked it for what it was and how it expanded on the Entities lore.

            Pale takes place in the world of Pact but in the future with different setting and characters. 3 girls introduced to magic with a strong emphasis on the Others and how they and humans coexist. I think it’s his best work so far and would suggest picking up here if something else doesn’t strike your fancy. Wildbow has said he likes writing in this world and I think it shows.

            I’d also check out: https://www.patreon.com/wildbow/about , it has concise descriptions of each work by the author.

    • x4740N@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I haven’t watched the full series yet and still need to since it’s just sitting on my hard drive

      But I have always wondered if there is one sigil or multiple combined sigils that could basically act as a medium for luz to use magic normally