As we are on the subject, I would like to go on a Harry Potter rant.
My little brother is having the Harry Potter series read to him, so something I keep noticing is the population. Rowling keeps mentioning that the wizard population is relatively small. She says the pureblood families going extinct and the muggle population is much larger than that of wizards, but how could this be? Wizards seem to reproduce at a similar rate to humans, and they have the advantage of muggle families often bearing magic children. Does this mean they die at a faster rate? It couldn’t be. Many wizards are noted to live far beyond 100. Humans can kill by poisoning, machine gun, bombing, Illness or many other things. Wizards on the other hand can stop poisoning very easily, don’t have either high tech weapons (but could protect from them easily), and have many magical cures for illness not barred by copyright or hospital bills. The way they do kill is poisoning, which is less likely to kill, by knife, which is easily reversed, or by a spell which is far less efficient than a human projectile. How is it then, that the biggest wizard school has only 28 athletes?
My other problem is: aren’t wizards supposed to have some great culture? They live like it’s the Middle Ages, without accepting much modern tech. Yet, they are shallow enough to adopt the human Christian holiday of Christmas, and they make terrible parodies of contemporary Christmas songs, (Sirius sings “merry hippogryphs” or something of the sort).
That concludes my Harry Potter problems that I haven’t seen someone like Shaun cover.
They live like it’s the Middle Ages, without accepting much modern tech.
The world of Harry Potter ignores means of production and and their ownership in shaping the world so you get this broken depiction because of that. As far as I could understand Malfoy’s family was wealthy because of his father was a government bureaucrat in cahoots with badguy but there is no explanation of where wealth comes from in general (at least in the movies, I haven’t read theory).
Harry Potter was meant to be a children’s book but because children are disillusioned and disappointed in the world they are brought in, the franchise grew bigger than it should have. The worldbuilding is riddled with holes for this reason.
Apart from this it seems like Rowling is just an asshole in general. There is a video by YouTuber, “Shaun”, who points out that there is a lot of meanness in the stories that are casually passed off as normal. Combining this the anti-semetic trope of large-nosed Goblin bankers and how Rowling is a raging bigot IRL, it is not surprising that the fascist-rhetoric of pure bloodlines and declining population features the way it does.
On your first point, why are the weazlys’ poor? They’ve got multiple people working similar jobs in the ministry. Why don’t they just build a new, larger house? With all that magic and land it should be easy. Maybe the mode of production is mercantilism or something? As, the only businesses or basically small. Businesses.
I actually Googled this and read some answers on Quora and Reddit. They say that the Weasley father worked in a department related to investigating objects ruled by muggles which was looked down upon and he did not get along with Draco Malfoy’s father and one more Ministry figure whose name I can’t recall. He was the sole breadwinner and had many children because of which he was poor. No one knows why the mother despite being a decently talented witch does not work. So it just looks like they are poor for the plot. Same reason why Harry does not use his inherited wealth to help Ron and his family, depsite them taking care of him as he were a part of the family. They are poor because they were meant to be poor. It is not because of any injustice. Some people are rich and some people are poor and the poors should just accept it and embrace the cutesy quaint and rustic aeathetic that comes with being poor.
The world of Harry Potter ignores means of production and and their ownership in shaping the world so you get this broken depiction because of that.
I think this, subconsciously, is part of its appeal. The Weasleys using hand-me-down gear and having a penny-pinching aesthetic is allowed to be ‘quaint’ and ‘charming,’ whereas when I’ve spent time with real friends who have to live like that it gets me angry thinking about why it’s like that. But for characters in Hogwarts, the positives are material and the negatives are harmless aesthetics, and there’s no ‘why’.
All of the negative aspects are taken care of by magic (except and only where the narrative requires struggle), leaving just the positives (e.g. a tightly-knit, supportive family). So on the one hand you’ve got an extremely relatable world because of all the superficial similarities, and on the other hand you don’t even notice the absence of the bad parts because in Harry Potter’s unreality they weren’t removed or solved; rather they were never there to begin with.
Yeah, it’s just the way HP completely omits the world building.
It’s like you got Tolkein world building where he builds the whole iceberg, Sanderson world building where he builds the tip of the iceberg but the huge bit below the surface is hollow, and Rowling world building where it’s literally just the tip but nobody looks down because they don’t want to know (until the author wades into politics and makes an ass of herself).
It’s not exclusive to HP but in it not describing the epistemology leaves a hole noticeably larger than other franchises.
In Witcher 3 for example there is magic but its much more limited in scope. There are kings and queens with armies so you can guess the class structure of the society.
In HP the reaches of magic are like Calvinball where it doesn’t follow any rules and just does whatever the author felt like. A young girl has access to a handy widget that can turn back time with no side effects at all. HP is extremely poorly thought out.
Yeah overall HP’s world building is a Jenga tower, it makes me lol when people say that it is a coherent fantasy world. Actually it’s double stupid because obviously the fact that it doesn’t make sense is part of why it’s successful. On one hand because it gives it a fairytale vibe, and most importantly because it pushes every good buttons in white privileged people’s mind by portraying a society that is nowhere different, just with floating things and old stuff’s aesthetics
As we are on the subject, I would like to go on a Harry Potter rant. My little brother is having the Harry Potter series read to him, so something I keep noticing is the population. Rowling keeps mentioning that the wizard population is relatively small. She says the pureblood families going extinct and the muggle population is much larger than that of wizards, but how could this be? Wizards seem to reproduce at a similar rate to humans, and they have the advantage of muggle families often bearing magic children. Does this mean they die at a faster rate? It couldn’t be. Many wizards are noted to live far beyond 100. Humans can kill by poisoning, machine gun, bombing, Illness or many other things. Wizards on the other hand can stop poisoning very easily, don’t have either high tech weapons (but could protect from them easily), and have many magical cures for illness not barred by copyright or hospital bills. The way they do kill is poisoning, which is less likely to kill, by knife, which is easily reversed, or by a spell which is far less efficient than a human projectile. How is it then, that the biggest wizard school has only 28 athletes? My other problem is: aren’t wizards supposed to have some great culture? They live like it’s the Middle Ages, without accepting much modern tech. Yet, they are shallow enough to adopt the human Christian holiday of Christmas, and they make terrible parodies of contemporary Christmas songs, (Sirius sings “merry hippogryphs” or something of the sort). That concludes my Harry Potter problems that I haven’t seen someone like Shaun cover.
The world of Harry Potter ignores means of production and and their ownership in shaping the world so you get this broken depiction because of that. As far as I could understand Malfoy’s family was wealthy because of his father was a government bureaucrat in cahoots with badguy but there is no explanation of where wealth comes from in general (at least in the movies, I haven’t read theory).
Harry Potter was meant to be a children’s book but because children are disillusioned and disappointed in the world they are brought in, the franchise grew bigger than it should have. The worldbuilding is riddled with holes for this reason.
Apart from this it seems like Rowling is just an asshole in general. There is a video by YouTuber, “Shaun”, who points out that there is a lot of meanness in the stories that are casually passed off as normal. Combining this the anti-semetic trope of large-nosed Goblin bankers and how Rowling is a raging bigot IRL, it is not surprising that the fascist-rhetoric of pure bloodlines and declining population features the way it does.
On your first point, why are the weazlys’ poor? They’ve got multiple people working similar jobs in the ministry. Why don’t they just build a new, larger house? With all that magic and land it should be easy. Maybe the mode of production is mercantilism or something? As, the only businesses or basically small. Businesses.
I actually Googled this and read some answers on Quora and Reddit. They say that the Weasley father worked in a department related to investigating objects ruled by muggles which was looked down upon and he did not get along with Draco Malfoy’s father and one more Ministry figure whose name I can’t recall. He was the sole breadwinner and had many children because of which he was poor. No one knows why the mother despite being a decently talented witch does not work. So it just looks like they are poor for the plot. Same reason why Harry does not use his inherited wealth to help Ron and his family, depsite them taking care of him as he were a part of the family. They are poor because they were meant to be poor. It is not because of any injustice. Some people are rich and some people are poor and the poors should just accept it and embrace the cutesy quaint and rustic aeathetic that comes with being poor.
I think this, subconsciously, is part of its appeal. The Weasleys using hand-me-down gear and having a penny-pinching aesthetic is allowed to be ‘quaint’ and ‘charming,’ whereas when I’ve spent time with real friends who have to live like that it gets me angry thinking about why it’s like that. But for characters in Hogwarts, the positives are material and the negatives are harmless aesthetics, and there’s no ‘why’.
All of the negative aspects are taken care of by magic (except and only where the narrative requires struggle), leaving just the positives (e.g. a tightly-knit, supportive family). So on the one hand you’ve got an extremely relatable world because of all the superficial similarities, and on the other hand you don’t even notice the absence of the bad parts because in Harry Potter’s unreality they weren’t removed or solved; rather they were never there to begin with.
Arguably that’s not exclusive to HP, but is in fact a feature of many western entertainments
Yeah, it’s just the way HP completely omits the world building.
It’s like you got Tolkein world building where he builds the whole iceberg, Sanderson world building where he builds the tip of the iceberg but the huge bit below the surface is hollow, and Rowling world building where it’s literally just the tip but nobody looks down because they don’t want to know (until the author wades into politics and makes an ass of herself).
It’s not exclusive to HP but in it not describing the epistemology leaves a hole noticeably larger than other franchises.
In Witcher 3 for example there is magic but its much more limited in scope. There are kings and queens with armies so you can guess the class structure of the society.
In HP the reaches of magic are like Calvinball where it doesn’t follow any rules and just does whatever the author felt like. A young girl has access to a handy widget that can turn back time with no side effects at all. HP is extremely poorly thought out.
Yeah overall HP’s world building is a Jenga tower, it makes me lol when people say that it is a coherent fantasy world. Actually it’s double stupid because obviously the fact that it doesn’t make sense is part of why it’s successful. On one hand because it gives it a fairytale vibe, and most importantly because it pushes every good buttons in white privileged people’s mind by portraying a society that is nowhere different, just with floating things and old stuff’s aesthetics