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.
“I wished for J.K. Rowling to write more wizard
stories and she wrote Fantastic Beasts”
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 one, 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 two, 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 some conflicting information in the books -
it's The killing curse, implying it's the only one.
But for example, sectumsempra would kill someone, eventually.
Avada Kedavra is apparently guaranteed instant death if
we ignore Barty claiming he could tank a
room full 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 did 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 it's feasible for muggles to beat
any given wizard's UnFoRgIvAbLe DaRk MaGiC by sending
two dudes with blunderbusses, three 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.
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 occurred 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 sectumsempra -
“You dare use my own spell against me, Potter”
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 go 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
third 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 reconquered
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.
“You live in a bubble where people do
what you want and tell you what you
want to hear.”
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 okay 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 unsolve 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.