Harry Potter/Headscratchers/Other: Difference between revisions

[[Harry Potter]] [[Harry Potter/Headscratchers|headscratchers]] that don't fit anywhere else.

 

 

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** It's quite obvious that we're ''supposed'' to be bothered by the wizarding world's ignorance and bigotry towards Muggles and the Muggle world. Arthur Weasley said it himself when he mentioned a couple of wizards enchanting public toilets to spew shit at Muggles or whatever. It seems like good fun, but it's a symptom of a much deeper, much uglier viewpoint held by some wizards. As for Hermione mind-wiping her parents, that was more of a "desperate times, desperate measures" kind of situation. Hermione wanted to keep her parents safe from the Death Eaters, who hate Muggles and would ''not'' be above killing them for shits and giggles, ''especially'' if they knew they could use it to get to one of Harry Potter's best friends, so she did the only thing she could think of to keep them absolutely safe. Call it unethical if you want, but it was the best solution she could think of at the time, and she wasn't exactly happy that she had to do it.

** That one incident with the eccentric witch who keeps getting herself captured by witch hunters and burned with fake fire is pretty telling about how some magical folk regard Muggles and their problems, even if it is one crazy person. One wonders how many Deatheater murders were covered up by [[The Troubles]]...

** For that matter, other anniversaries, important dates, and birthdays seem to be completely passed over unless they're relevant to the plot. Harry's birthday is the only consistent one we see mentioned; Hermione's birthday is rarely mentioned, and Ron's only is when it's relevant. [[Butt Monkey|Like when bad stuff happens to him on it.]]

*** This always, always bugged me, that Ron and Hermione's birthdays are barely mentioned. Even something in passing would have been nice.

*** Isn't it stated somewhere that Hermione's birthday is in early September, and therefore usually before Harry and Ron meet up with her? I'm sure her birthdays have been mentioned a couple of times. With regards to Ron's birthday: they're at boarding school, so it's not like they go out and celebrate. Would a paragraph saying "Happy birthday Ron, here's your present" really have made such a massive difference?

**** Hermione's birthday is in late September according to [[Word of God]], but considering they all start school Sept 1 each year, they're all clearly at school. (OTOH, it makes you realized that her first year, she had no friends for her 12th birthday.) The books generally skip right over her birthday, from 'everyone shows up at school' to 'it's Halloween, time for something to happen'. Hermione's birthday is always before the main plot starts, so it's not like they're distracted. No Chamber of Secrets yet, Sirius Black yet isn't sneaking into the school, Harry isn't in the Tri-Wiz yet, Harry's not yet banned from Quidditch, Ron's not yet dating Lavender...frankly, as things seem to go from reasonable to bad each year, you'd think Hermione's birthday would be a bit of normalcy at the start of the school year.

** Maybe he didn't remember exactly which night Hagrid had said it had been (he was getting a lot of new info then), and didn't feel like asking anyone later.

** Regarding Harry's birthday, his parents' deathday, and holidays: The Dursleys hardly acknowledged Harry's birthday and holidays, so he's used to ignoring them; I wouldn't be surprised if they never told him the exact date of his parents' "car accident" and because of that there's no emotional connection between the two. As for other people's birthdays, Harry probably didn't (couldn't?) have many friends before Hogwarts, so he's not used to that, either. In the larger narrative of the series, it could be that A) they weren't mentioned because it didn't add to the plot (from [[The Hobbit]], paraphrased: [[Good Is Boring|safe and peaceful rarely makes for good stories]]) and B) later on they couldn't have had time to celebrate them anyway.

** I had the following rant on the Philosopher's Stone page before it got deleted: "Gringotts bugs this troper, because it behaves nothing like a real bank does. In a real bank, most people have accounts, where they store their money. This is a ''loan'' to the bank, which invests their money in businesses (such as loans to home buyers) to make profit for itself. In exchange, the bank offers people a relatively safe place to keep their savings, give them interests, and gives them convenience (several bank locations, ATM's, online payments, etc...). It is important to note the reason they can do the latter is because the bank doesn't keep your ''original'' money; a bank account is just information, a number saying how much they owe you, and when you withdraw money they simply make that number smaller. Transferring information is much easier than transferring physical items. There ARE safe deposit boxes, which you pay to maintain and which keep your valuables in an specific and safe location, but the overwhelming majority of the bank's costumers deal with them in the above basis. However, Gringotts seems to be nothing '''but''' a collection of safe deposit boxes. Every wizard doing business with them has a vault, and can store whatever they please there. Whatever they store remains there; the galleons Harry sees when he arrives are the very same ones his parents deposited years ago, and other objects of value (such as the Philosopher's stone) can be stored in vaults. It is never stated how the bank earns its money or what profit it gains from providing this service to wizards, but it can be assumed they are paid for it (it's interesting to note the Potters' vault remained in use, but there are several explanations; maybe payments are or can be done several decades in advance, maybe the goblins take gold from the vaults at regular intervals, or maybe Dumbledore or some other person made the payments before Harry arrived to reclaim the vault). Every time they want to access their money, they must travel to Diagon Alley and bring their key. Thus the bank offers no convenience and no interest, instead simply serving as a safe place to store goods - any goods - in exchange for a fee. In short, Gringotts is not a real bank; it is a glorified storage compartment center."

*** In many parts of the world, most particularly the Islamic world, banking as we know it is illegal, and what they call banks are basically places you pay a fee to hold your money. They don't do anything like interest, compound, or simple, they don't loan money in the fashion we understand it. In fact, this is how actual banks used to act in the West before the Catholic Church's ban on collecting interest was lifted. It is a real bank - it's just not a ''modern Western-style'' bank.

** Originally, when the templars came up with the concept of a bank, the entire point was to keep your money safe and letting you take out said money at any city in Christendom with no handing out of interest involved (at that time, the bank client that pays for the bank services); the idea of the bank as investor came much later. Obviously, magical banking probably developed from the original bankers, and seeing that everyone can come to the bank magically in a literal blink of an eye, and ditched the second perpose of the banking system.

** Who says that you have to move the money to make loans and transactions? That's why contracts were invented. When all the money that was available was big and heavy, [[IO Us]] and contracts were used to handle major transactions on a day-to-day basis, and the currency itself didn't make an appearance except at crucial points. That's how the modern gold supply tends to "move" - it changes owners, but it all sits in one location (like the New York Federal Reserve). The goblins could conceivably keep track of the transfers and move the physical gold every so often to reflect the end-of-month, end-of-quarter, or end-of-whatever balance.

** This is most likely another call back to the British boarding school books that Harry Potter is (somewhat) based on. TV, Radio, and (to a lesser extent) reading aren't very popular.

** It could be argued that Lockhart's books are more recreational literature than textbooks.

** Still, they're purported to be nonfiction.

** If you could do magic and entertain yourself any way you wanted, would you really be reading or watching tv? Also, we only see most of the wizards in school, when they're swamped with homework. We only see Harry in the summer, and judging from the Dursleys, I doubt there are any recreational books in the house. We see Ron and Hermione too, but they're mostly talking, playing Quidditch, and doing housework when we see them with time off. Also, I'm sure Hermione reads tons of fiction when she gets the chance.

*** Magic to them is electronics to us. We have the internet, videogames, ipods, phones, etc. Why would we need sports when we can literally do whatever we want in digital worlds?

**** And yet people still do sports in their free time. Just the fact that there are other options does not change the popularity of most pastimes.

** There's nothing saying that they never read. True, it's never mentioned that they do, but it's also not explicitly said that they don't. It's entirely possible that Harry spends his summers reading novels. It's just not mentioned because it's not important to the plot. It's the same as people complaining that nobody on ''[[Friends]]'' ever works. Well of course they work, it's just not shown because it's (usually) irrelevant to the plot. Remember that only bits and pieces of what's going on are actually detailed in the books. The author leaves out lots of mundane details of the day that aren't important to the story. This could very well be the case for recreational reading in Harry Potter.

** It also barely ever mentions people going to the bathroom or bathing/showering, but are we expected to believe they were holding it in and never washing for seven years? Things that aren't relevant to the plot tend to not be mentioned.

*** "Why couldn't Crouch just order her to leave if it didn't break the binding?" Tradition maybe? Logically, there's really no reason why giving clothes to a house elf should, in and of itself, set them free. They're just clothes. For that matter, there's no logical reason for house elves to eschew clothes in the first place. I therefore surmise that the house elf/clothes connection is nothing but an ancient tradition whose origins have been lost to time, not any kind of real binding magical contract or anything. Giving a house elf clothes is ''symbolic'' of setting them free.

** But there is a magical bond between a house elf and its master that has to be broken somehow for an elf to be set free. We know there's a tangible bond because Kreacher was able to get out of Voldy's cave when Regulus summoned him. Presumably a house elf's obligation to punish itself for disobeying an order is also part of the bond. I always assumed that somehow the giving of clothes somehow broke it literally as well as symbolically, otherwise how could Lucius have accidentally set Dobby free?

 

* Why aren't the Dursleys punished for what they did to Harry at some point? Okay, revenge isn't exactly nice, but they abused him practically the whole time he lived there. So at least some payback would not only be in order, but downright mandatory.

 

** So I disagree with the idea that Harry should get revenge on the Dursleys, but I'm all for punishment (of Petunia and Vernon at least, I'm not sure how much you can really blame Dudley). I mean, they abused Harry, they should go to jail for child abuse.

** Alternate theory: In the first book, they talk about "squashing it out of him." Perhaps they ''don't'' hate Harry as much as it seems, and they are trying to give him what they honestly see as the better life. Maybe if his eleventh birthday had passed without event, they would have eased up and things could have been salvaged a little, but when it didn't, they got desperate and started trying harder despite knowing they were bound to/had already failed, and it was a convenient way to vent whatever frustration they had in their lives that they were already used to. Love will make you do much worse things than hate, and it gives the Dursleys and the series another dimension. I will grant that the Dursleys kind of have to be hateful, bitter, narrow people anyway, but someone can be hateful and bitter and narrow without being cartoon evil. I will also grant that there's no canon evidence for this, but I'll chalk that up to a) it's a children's series, and thus I don't expect moral ambiguity, and b) JK seriously sucks at writing believable villains (seriously, ask any fanfic writer/roleplayer who tries to write from the villain standpoint. It's nearly impossible to do without just giving up and doing it [[For the Evulz]]).

*** Another theory: Dumbledore, through Harry's life, ''has'' been intervening and keeping hidden from Harry. The Dursleys slip some abuse beneath the radar, though: Dumbledore's not omniscient.

* What's up with the 'wizards are born not made business'? It sounds something a racial eugenics doctor came up with!

** And the problem is? The way JKR defined her 'world', the ability to control magic is based on a genetical trait, like e.g. hair color. If it were just a matter of learning, it would be a wholly different world: no [[Masquerade]], no [[Fantastic Racism]]... Overall, the whole plot of the series would not make sense any more, as the main reason for the war is said racism.

*** I think the idea is to hide magical creatures that can't be explained by Muggle science, and everything else they just count as Muggle animals, like goats. They produce bezoars, wich are classified as magical but goats arn't, and i know people will say "how do they know what muggle science can explain when they don't know about muggles?" Well, that's simple, there's a whole section of the Ministry for people who know about muggle things. How else could you explain Muggle Studies teachers?

** For that matter, how did flobberworms ever get on the list of magical creatures? By their description in ''[[Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them]]'', there's nothing magic about them whatsoever. Granted, their secretions get used in potions sometimes, but so do bits of mundane animals, like cricket wings or snake scales.

** They are just confusing Astrology and Astronomy?

* Okay, this also has to do with Hogwarts, but mainly the series in general... why the heck is Hagrid not allowed to use magic? The first book establishes that it's because he was expelled. However, once he turned seventeen, he should have been able to use magic regardless of whether or not he finished Hogwarts. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George also did not finish Hogwarts, and they're still allowed to do magic. Granted, he was accused of summoning a monster that killed someone, but even after his name was cleared and he got a cushy teaching job, they still didn't allow him to go to Olivander's and get a new wand. If it has to do with the fact that he was expelled from Hogwarts rather than dropping out like the protagonists did, it still seems like [[Disproportionate Retribution]]. Also, Sirius and Bellatrix ''broke out of jail'' and still manage to do magic just fine, so what gives?

** Half-breed prejudice, maybe?

*** Remeber, they had him doing all the housework. They might've been annoyed when he started dropping/breaking things because he couldn't see.

* Something just occured to me. What if a witch/wizard were born blind or deaf or paralyzed? What happens to them? Do they learn magic that enables them to see/hear/move? Or are they just SOL in the magic department?

** Blind? Magic eye. Deaf? Reparo on eardrum. Paralysed? Reparo on spinal cord. These guys can heal shattered skulls in seconds, it's not hard for them to repair disabilities.

** They're trained to deal with [[Brown Note|Basilisks, Mandrakes, and Fwoopers]]!

****** The majority of wizards are not purebloods, which means, the majority of wizards will have Muggle family members within two generations if not in their immediate family. This makes 100% compliance with Muggle genocide from the wizarding population ''extremely unlikely''. Frig, it would make 10% compliance extremely unlikely. On the flip side, it also means that there will exist a nontrivial amount of sentiment on the Muggle side for finding some solution less extreme than 'kill every person with the wizarding gene'.

**** The above depends on assuming that a Muggle-Wizard war would be fought like the conventional, big battle-field style battles of WWII. This is patently rediculous. Magic in Harry Potter is perfect for non-conventional, asymmetric gurilla warfare. Think about it, your soldiers, vehicles, and bases can become invisible, they can be teleport instantaneously between remote locations, and everyone in the population is trained in the use of a weapon that can heal, incapacitate, maim, and kill. Not to mention that in a real war, you do not need to kill everyone (or even 99% of the population) you just need to do enough damage to awe your enemies into surrender, and Shock and Awe is the Wizard's strong suit ("Listen up, we can bend the laws of physics and reality by talking fast, so submit to us before we turn your extended family into gerbils."). With good planning, Wizards can do pretty well in a war. And if all else fails, they still have Dementors and the Inferi.

*** And Muggles, despite the purebloods' claims, still give birth to and/or father a healthy percentage of the next generation of wizards. Yes, wizards ''might'' be able to conquer the Muggle population, but how much good will that do them in the long term, if all it achieves is to make Muggle-dom so hateful of their kind that every Muggleborn kid in future generations is going to get put down like a rabid dog by his or her own family, terrified of the "monster" they've produced? Sure, Voldemort's fans might convince themselves that's a good thing, but check back in a few hundred years and all you'd have left of wizardry would be a few pathetic, inbred remnants like the Gaunts.

* Does anyone else think that Dumbledore hating Dementors is fantastic racism? I mean, sure the Dementors eat happiness, but it's just the way they evolved. Similiarly humans and many animals eat meat because our metabolic processes were designed to do so, and eating meat requires the animal to die, while all Dementors do is make people unhappy for a bit. While it is true that the Dementor's kiss is truly a horrifying experience, it is once again on par with humans and animals killing for food. Dementors only do their kiss on people who they happen to know are evil, they never do it on someone innocent (unless they were told the person was evil); in this sense, Dementors can be seen as lawful neutral, they do what they do to survive and kiss those who their boss tells them to. And it's not like a person who was kissed can't be put out of their misery. Because they feed on happiness, that means that working as Azkaban guards must really suck. They really put their well being on the line for the people they work for.

*** "Being" only means "sentient", not "nice" or even "civilized". There are plenty of evil creatures that aren't in ''Fantastic Beasts'', and werewolves ''in human form'' are classed as "Beings".

** I always thought of the Dementors as a [[Neutral Evil]] / [[True Neutral]] [[Wild Card]], myself. You know, as if switching sides instantly because the other faction has better prospects, draining positive emotions and ''eating souls'' wasn't at least ''some'' evidence for [[Blue and Orange Morality]]. Or possibly [[Black and White Insanity|Blue And Orange Insanity.]]

 

** um about St.Mungo's its explained why its NOT in Diagonal Alley Moody explains it when they go to see Arthur there. Its because there was no place in Digonal Alley big enough for St. Mungo's.

* Why exactly are Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans popular at all? Regular companies without magic can create candy that tastes like vomit or earwax but don't. Why? Because no one wants to eat something that tastes like that. Companies make candies that people actually want to taste like chocolate and cherry. Admittedly there are people who like mouth-watering candies that make your eyes water, but they aren't a majority and those candies aren't stocked in large amounts.

** But thats the appeal! You buy chocolate, you get chocolate. You buy a bag of Bertie Bott's, you could get anything. Could be chocolate, could be toast, could be ants, could be boogers. Every bean is a gamble. They also seem to be more popular with kids (the one time Dumbledore ate one, he had his [[Nostalgia Goggles]] on), who can appretiate the "danger" and the grossness. There is a social factor too: You can't say much about sharing a chocolate bar, but with the Beans you and your friends have something to talk about with every bite.

* Why didn't any of the characters simply apparate out of tight situations? I can understand Dumbledore and Snape, since it's impossible to apparate in/out of Hogwarts, but what about Lily, James and Harry? If she heard Voldemort coming, she probably had more than enough time to grab Harry and just apparate to a safer place, and I don't seem to recall there being anything mentioned about how "they couldn't have done that because so and so".

** They didn't have their wands with them (established in DH). Unless you are crazy powerful and can do wandless magic (i.e. you are Dumbledore/Voldemort), you need a wand to Apparate.

* What's the point in training to become an Auror? The ones we saw seemed no more competent at defeating Death Eaters than normal Hogwarts students.

** The six people who went to the Ministry are hardly 'normal Hogwarts students' and Aurors are more competent than them, if only by virtue of knowing more magic. Aurors also don't exist solely for the purpose of catching Death Eaters or else there would be no Aurors when the books start. Asking why bother having Aurors if there are stronger Death Eaters is like asking why bother having police if a criminal could still shoot them.

* And what kind of people call themselves "Dark" without irony? Light makes sence because anyone could call themselves that? Humanity's worst monsters typically either think they're saving the world or don't care what anyone calls them.

** Maybe an outbreak of [[Then Let Me Be Evil]]. Maybe they tried to give themselves a badass-sounding intimidating name and failed. Maybe they were given the moniker by a newspaper and it stuck.

 

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[[Category:Headscratchers]]

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