Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
574 points (94.8% liked)
memes
9806 readers
6 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because it's a cop out. You're not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It's the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.
Harry potter isn't the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.
There's also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn't work. An electric kettle won't work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don't have limits or an idea of what's dangerous/important
Sometimes the answer could be "hey, we don't know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn't there yet."
But maybe it doesn't matter to the story. HP isn't a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There's all kinds of things we didn't and/or don't fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the "rules" of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don't see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It's not that sort of magic - I'd call it a "soft-ish" magic system if we're going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.
I get your points, I'm not trying to say you are wrong, I'm just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn't the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.
Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that's a matter of personal preference, not "correctness" if that makes any sense.