14h ago

Harry and Ron were always bored in class because Rowling's magic system is boring as hell

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)

42 comments

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

Who sanderson

I mean, it isnt quite juvenile fiction, but it's a series of books about kids. Having the magic system being simple makes sense.

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.

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.
https://hpmor.com/

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.

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.
- I like the universes where being taught can also be fun. It has the funny side effect of making the pupil want to learn even more!
  Fuck the universes that keep entertainment and learning separate.

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 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.

What's boring about the magic system in Harry Potter? Can you give specific examples?
- No limits on how often you can cast spells
  No explanation of how magic actually works
  No explanation of how magic objects are created
  No explanation of how spells are invented
  No explanation of how different species' magic differs
  All the spell names are silly words in English and poorly understood Latin
  Never explained why incantations or gestures are needed
  Never explained what makes spells other than Patronus hard or easy
  Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than "they learned a lot of spells"
  Few/no limitations on spells, or limitations aren't explained
  No contextually dependent spells
  It's impossible to predict what will happen in the books based on understanding the magic system
  There are just. no. rules.
  Brandon Sanderson is the best magic system writer in the world, and these are his "laws of magic" for creating an interesting magic system:
  The First Law
  Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
  The Second Law
  Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this: Limitations > Powers
  (Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way: Ω > | though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)
  The Third Law
  The third law is as follows: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
  Rowling never follows these principles. The reader doesn't understand the magic, magic is rarely given sensical limitations we understand, and Rowling always adds new stuff instead of explaining what we already have.
  I posit that the answers to all these questions I listed just don't exist. There is no explanation. Hermione does well in school because she rote memorises. Harry and Ron can't engage with the material in their homework because they don't understand it because nobody does.
  What Harry Potter's magic system, insofar as it exists, does do well, is vibes. It feels like a wondrous magic system. That's what sold books. Harry likes all the vibes stuff in the books, like the spooky castle, fighting evil, being a strong wizard. He doesn't understand any of the magical theory, because it doesn't exist.
  
  Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than "they learned a lot of spells"
  This obviously relates to the amount of midi-chlorians the wizard have
  
  Harry Potter has a soft magic system - a system where pretty much everything can be explained by "a wizard did it", worlds like that are mystical and lawless (see also Lord of the Rings)
  it seems you enjoy more hard magic systems like you described above, where the rules are explained, and you can more or less understand why things work the way they do (see also Earthsea by U.K. Le Guin or ATLA)
  the hard/soft scale is not perfect, but it gives you a rough gist of what to expect
  writers aren't limited to just one either! Percy Jackson has a soft magic system, a lot of "a ~~wizard~~ god did it!", where Kane Chronicles has a strict magic system bound by understandable rules (with only gods and divine interventions going above the rules)
  
  You know what? Rowling did actually follow Sanderson's laws with one specific bit of magic. The time turner. The time turner has a very simple limitation: you cannot change the past. But, you can do things in the past that don't change what you experienced the first time. We understand how the time turner works, and Rowling comes up with a clever way to make it work, which makes sense to us. That's the second and first law! The time turner is well written!
  And then she broke the third rule. She didn't expand on it, she added something new in book 4 instead. So people asked "what about the time turner", and in the next book she got mad and destroyed them all so she'd never be asked "what about the time turner" again.
  Rowling wrote something really interesting that actually makes sense. And then decided she didn't want it in her story anymore. Because Rowling doesn't actually like writing interesting magic. And that's why Harry and Ron aren't very interested in magic. Rowling was never able to write a scene where a character actually geeks out about how magic works, because she doesn't care how it works. She's not interested.
  
  Sanderson is such a beast, everything he has written that I've read is solid gold!
- Nothing memorable enough to mention.

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.
- Yeah, OP must not spend much time around teenagers

42 comments

The First Law

The Second Law

The Third Law