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What would you say is the most unsung "plot hole" in Harry Potter? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

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Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn't become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling's work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?

So then let's talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think "huh, what's the deal with this if that thing is how it is". While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don't always reflect something that doesn't add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don't go away. And there's nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?

If Rowling herself ever notices that I'm bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I'm collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling's prestige if Rowling's work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can't remember if it's mentioned in the books, but I think the idea is that Muggle technology stops working in the presence of magic. Guns would jam, electronics would brick, etc.

Granted, this raises the question of where do you draw the line? For example, the magical world has countless exploding substances. What if they took some, stuffed it down a long metal tube, insterted a small metal object in front of it, then set fire to the explosive stuff from the back end? That's basically a gun or cannon, and it's hard to argue that it's technologically complex.

[–] dual_sport_dork 2 points 7 hours ago

That's really the rub. The notion that magic "knows" what technology is and draws the line at some arbitrary point where it suddenly rearranges the laws of reality around itself so that these devices won't work specifically in the way that humans expect them to raises the following two horrifying possibilities:

One, whatever force is actually behind magic must be intelligent in and of itself, even if only in a brutish and rudimentary way. It would take a staggering array of quite specific and tailor-made microspells or localized tweaks in physics to make all types of Muggle technology fail to work consistently. Like, it's not just enough to say "guns jam." Does magic physically grab the hammer and stop it from falling? Does it block the firing pin? Does it rearrange the laws of chemistry so that oxidation reactions don't happen? Does it stick its finger in the end of the barrel like Bugs Bunny?

Or, like, fountain pens. They work via exactly the same mechanism as quill pens, it's just that they contain their own store of ink. Is there any other reason why a quill would work within Hogwarts but a fountain pen wouldn't? Here in rational space, no. Absolutely not. So if that's how it is, there must be something more going on behind the scenes and the fact that these bozos either haven't noticed or worse, that they have noticed and just don't care enough to investigate in any way whatsoever is equal parts creepy and infuriating.

So point two, given all of the above the force behind magic is also probably actively malevolent. Who knows what its agenda is keeping wizards locked in a kind of medieval stasis, or if it's even doing so on purpose or just as a byproduct of its natural function, but either way it's clearly not working in humanity's best interest.

(There's a third option as well, which is that it works this way because the author has such a poor grasp on reality that she thinks that guns/electronics/cars/whatever also work via some kind of "magic" which can thus be disrupted, which is possibly likely but also so stupid it makes my right eyebrow twitch just thinking about it. So we'll leave it at that.)