

in the interest of my new year's resolution to not talk about Magic *the gathering* anymore... let's do a quick one about another formerly-beloved magical IP.


this may be a hot take, but the entire harry potter universe has an elephant in the room about how its entire plot works:
wizards are dumb.
And I don't mean, the IP is bad and you shouldn't like it. That's left as an exercise for the reader.
I mean the wizarding world is, canonically, top to bottom, infested with fucking morons.

of course it would be: 
point 1, think about how eagerly your brain will offload thought. quick, when's your sister's dog's birthday? fuck knows, you own a calendar. Give driving directions from your high school to your current favorite bar. who knows, just pull up GPS. Do you have the speed of sound memorized? Einstein would just look it up. So it follows that wizards have an attitude of "waving a stick and saying some words works reliably enough, who cares why".
point 2, there is precisely one catch-all gen-ed class at hogwarts. 
here's a fun game: the next time someone says "they should teach (blank) in schools", ask them what existing courses they're going to get rid of to make room. Students' schedules have been overfull forever - and at hogwarts, who knows what they discarded for magic.

Anyway, think about how many plot holes are filled in:

1) why are wizards hiding from muggles in spite of avada kedavra? There's a lot of conflicting information in the books - it's *The* "killing curse", implying it's the only one. But for example sectum sempra *would* kill someone, eventually. 
Avada Kedavra is apparently guaranteed instant death, if we ignore Barty claiming he could tank a roomfull and come out of it with a nosebleed. The whole reason harry is a celebrity is that he's apparently the only known person to have survived it once. So apparently every kid with a wand is walking around with instant death on a stick. 
how do wizards get persecuted into hiding by muggles, when they can fly and muggles were still horse-centric?
because they don't have as much control of magic as they tell you they do. If a wand and the knowledge of avada kedavra is a handgun with infinite ammo, it still has to be aimed and it takes time to execute, so maybe its feasible for muggles to beat any given wizard's unforgivable dark magic by sending 2 dudes with blunderbusses. 3 to be extra sure.
2) why do wizards have to enslave house-elves to cook and clean when there's a clean-up-the-room spell? has there never been a great wizard Microwavicus Boyardee?
4) look at all the construction - the weasleys just magic'd up their house, and whatever building came out is as good as they're ever going to get. 
(heh), magical construction predicted vibe coding by 20 years.
Hogwarts has a whimsical labyrinth of stairs with lots of moving parts, surely because a spiral staircase with regular landings just never occured to them.
Wizards have tardis-camp-tents, and yet not every wizard rents a cheap storage unit to store a port key to their palatial mansion.
5) Are spells invented or discovered? We see zero evidence that any wizard has ever had an inkling of curiosity about the fundamental nature of magic itself. Snape apparently created sectum sempra - did he... upload that to the leylines? or did he just go "wow, wave wand in this motion, say these words... conveniently, it works! i don't know why, but it'll work for you!" harry's too dumb to have ever invented a spell, surely, but hermione must have. 
6) why do evil characters keep demonstrating how much they don't care about their loyal subordinates, but going through trouble to bust them out of jail? because those henchmen are an unfathomably rare specimen of a coworker with some basic competency.
3) hi i tore the very fabric of time and space to move this point to the back: they issued a time travel locket to a 3rd grader! to be honest none of the rest of these even matter.

no wonder the "fEaReD dArK lOrD" (who lost a 1v1 against literally a baby) got brought back to life and had the world re-conquered in a few months.

You might wonder why I haven't touched on the seemingly paradoxical rarity of Liquid Luck. There *is* a good in-universe justification for why it isn't dispensed out of fountains every 10 feet.


Welcome to the *real* video, the actual point I'm getting around to:


The narrative function of felix felicis is actually great. Even ignoring toxicity, it 

can't possibly 

not

warp your perspective. 
Analogy: suppose we invented a chemically perfect painkiller. This hypothetical wonder drug has no other side effects, isn't toxic, isn't directly addictive, and is somehow so cheap that everyone has a lifetime supply.
You should still abstain.
Pain is data, and if this drug is just obscuring that data from you, you won't realize that your damage is outpacing your healing. 
Do you like sunlight? 
If not for the emotional reaction of avoiding sunburn, how long do you think it will be before you give yourself skin cancer? Likewise, Felix Felicis offers to do too much for you. 
I'm sure you know someone who has atypical advantages working for them, and thinks that's just how the world works. 

Because, as Churchill didn't quite say-
> we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
A person acclimates to their tools. Like I referenced above: No one can remember birthdays, because calendar software is a solved problem. No one can do mental math, because we reliably have a calculator with us. Countless rhymes to share intuitions about tomorrow's weather have been made obsolete by the national weather service.

This is all great. Victories of engineering.

But it's still not ok to remain entirely ignorant. 
Calendar software is a solved problem thanks to the vcal standard - so an entity that obscures it from you is trying to un-solve the problem and make you dependent on them, so they can raise their price.
A calculator is a great thing to have with you - so imagine if your device's owner didn't deign to give you a calculator?

In both of those cases, you'd offload your thought to a service, which then stops.
So shape your tools to be sure the way they shape you back is acceptable.




