this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Literally could have happened in Harry Potter. It actually drove me crazy. There were two separate times in the series that she made it abundantly clear that the average wizard doesn't even know what a gun is let alone how dangerous it can be.
I'm willing to bet Protego would stop a bullet but the average wizard wouldn't even try because they would just be laughing at the silly little muggle pointing a piece of metal at them.
I think a bullet may even be faster than a wizard casting protego.
This could quickly be explained away as a contingent spell that specifically stops common muggle weapons.
The one moment that really irks me in the concept of wizard wars is a moment in deathly hallows. The gang are captured in Malfoy Manor and Harry manages to grab 3 wands from Draco Malfoy's hand, and casts stupify on Fenrir Greyback, who is hit with thrice the intensity and fucking basically dies.
If this works why aren't wizards rocking bundles of wands, let's see Harry use expeliarmus to counter Voldie's wizard wand Gatling gun of avada kedavra, or a bundle of wands casting sectumsempura and fucking turning a wizard to mince.
Wanna hit me with the torture curse you wizard nerd? I'll just use my bundle of sticks, my wand strap to Wingardium Leviosa you straight into the sun.
Also the thing with multiple wands doesn't seem fully explored
Maybe there are potential drawbacks
There's also the logistics of multiple wands and how could that be optimised,
would packing multiple cores into one wand achieve the same effect, or would it damage the wand ?
And I assume more wizards haven't tried to wand thing due to arrogance and being stuck in the past
I'm not really a fan of the writing of Harry Potter, it often falls into a trap of being a mystery adventure where the puzzles are then trivialised by magic which seems forgotten next time it would be applicable, and I like to try to race the characters to solutions which you can't really do in this format.
I'd love to write a TV show in the harry potter universe starring a squib (someone incapable of having magical powers who knows if the wizarding world) running a mundane repair shop for wizards in London near Diagon Alley. They'd basically be losing their minds at the regular cast of wizards being upsettingly inefficient and naive with their magical potential, while also running this repair shop for them that looks more like an antiques shop. It would definitely explore these questions as the protagonist pins down their wizard friends and makes them do multiple wand tests etc. The whole show would lovingly poke fun at the unanswered questions and plot holes of the Harry Potter universe and consistently paint the wizards as lovable but arrogant goofs who never had a proper education past 11 years old.
I don't think Harry Potter needs Binary Lasers, those are scary enough in battletech
I wish he did this. This is Gold!
Duck-foot pistol, but it's just a lollipop stand loaded with Ollivander's factory seconds. It'd almost look like a toy broom until it sweeps an entire squad.
Whatever you say is Latin for "fuck everyone in this general direction."
Is this in the books or the movies
The books. he picks up 3 wands, uses the stunner spell, and the spell blasts greyback so hard he literally flies up and smashes into the ceiling. the ceiling in the entrance hall of a huge mansion so it had to be very high.
In the books, wands aren't just objects. They have a degree of sentience and therefore can conceivably rebel against the user. I imagined there is a compatibility issue with using multiple wands at once that may have been temporarily suspended when Harry used them on Fenrir. Might be cause the wands hated Fenrir too or liked Harry enough to let that one spell go. I don't know. But in my own head canon the use of multiple wands is untenable because it just doesn't work out and the wizard is more likely to explode themselves that fire off a good powerful spell and Harry, as always, just has really good fucking luck.
Wands don't generate mana / magical energy. Wizards do. The wands are just efficient at chanelling it in a single beam. So if you use multiple wands together, you sacrifice staying power for firepower. Which means if you miss, you'll take longer to recharge, and meanwhile you are a sitting duck.
One thing I don't really ever coming across in the harry potter books were people being exhausted by powerful spells, perhaps I just can't remember a case where that happens.
It's always portrayed that you need a base magical ability and then from then all it's all knowhow.
Hmm you're right. But the hours-long duel Dumbledore had with Grindelwald is mentioned as something only he could do. So it might be that magical energy is limited, but you'd need to be casting spells for more than an hour or so for it to start having an effect.
True but in my mind I'm always picturing something like a mugging? Where they don't know they're up against a wizard? So then you run into the same problem but from the other angle. The muggle wouldn't think twice about giving the wizard time to say the word protego
In the D20 season Misfits & Magic they call this sort of thing out, where Brennan's character mentions nukes, the wizard has no idea what they are, and he's like, "You gotta know. You gotta know what nukes are."
Yeah that's another huge thing that bugged me. I doubt wizards know muggles have world ending technology. And I refuse to believe they have a spell thats gonna stand up to a nuke.
In one of the Fantastical Beasts movies there is mention of atomic bombs in some visions and they see it as a major threat. So it's kinda canon that some non-muggles know about nukes.
The somewhat regrettable fanfic Methods Of Rationality has Quirrel pull a fucking uzi on Harry. Totally reasonable for a well-traveled megalomaniac to have in his robes. A tool for every occasion.
Fucking what
I was about to mention here A Study In Magic, a Sherlock x HP crossover that actually doesn't suck, where this shit is mentioned, but MOR had a fucking uzi appear like this????
I couldn't get into MOR, and now I'm even more conflicted wether I should read it or not
When Harry meets Hermoine he tells her to name all the quarks or else she's an NPC.
Which is intense whiplash from the previous chapter, where politely asking Draco to describe the Death Eaters' whole deal has him ticking off rhetorical beats for plain old fascism.
Basically, the Less Wrong guy wrote a full Harry Potter novel, and it is exactly what you'd expect. Some aspects are fantastic! Others... yikes.
A detail I love that's not a spoiler: Crabbe and Goyle are well-characterized to act exactly the way they are in canon. They've been molded as bodyguards since they were little, and now they're in wizard middle school getting to play tough-guy bruisers on Draco's behalf, so of course they're tryhard doofuses that he finds mildly embarrassing. But when Quirrel invites one of them to spar, demonstrating the ancient mystical defense known as... judo... Goyle quietly asks what belt he has. Quirrel says "seventh dan." The tough-guy act comes right back up, and Goyle throws himself into it, because he knows he's about to get his ass kicked, safely.
The whole thing is ultimately about modeling people on these layers of facade. A lot of it gets overly analytical and kinda up-its-own-ass. Certain characters call that out and condemn actions at face value, so some of it's deliberate writing for the protagonist and antagonist. But only some.
Even with abundant benefit of the doubt, figuring 'this guy wrote Harry like a know-it-all child,' any recommendation would be complicated.
Okay that judo stuff is fucking amazing
This is why I love fanfic