He was abducted by Hagrid when he turned 11 so that would place him maybe around the fifth or sixth grade.
I don’t know if canonically there are math classes at Hogwarts.
The thought came to while I was watching the anime Mashle.
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Wizards don’t need math. They can just use magic like a calculator, but cooler.
I don’t remember where the books said it, but I remember them saying that they go to school before hogwarts the way that we go to school there just isn’t magic. Harry and Hermoine talked about going to school.
Okay dude… Because of YOU I started watching Mashle and I’m not even big into anime. I’ve watched a few and like some occasionally…
Mashle is awesome. Damn/thank you.
That makes me glad I included that with the post
I would trade maths knowledge for actual magic every single time. Maths basically was invented because of money & land, and that’s basically irrelevant with magic. Don’t need acres of land if you can have multiple wildlife reservations inside of a suitcase.
It’s honestly one of the best things about Harry Potter series: it leaves as much muggle crap out of it as possible.
Maths is the language of the universe. Show some god damned respect.
The universe has its language, and maths are the captions we can read not the true language. So no, you have some respect.
Oh dear, no. Not at all. No, not in the slightest. No. That’s not…
No.
Most of us only know 5th grade math
You don’t have to brag about it. Geez.
I thought you said Gaetz. He likes 'em at a fifth grade level.
Seems like someone reads at a 5th grade level too. :p
“Arithmancy” is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione’s favorite subjects.
At one point, the real world evil witch that is JK Rowling suggested that Arithmancy is like dviniation, but with math, saying they use numbers to predict the future. I take this to mean that the wizarding community discovered calculus independently from the rest of the world and mistook it for a new form of magic.
Divination with maths is statistics.
In the games, arithmancy is portrayed as number puzzles that need to be solved.
number puzzles that need to be solved.
In JK Rowling’s mind the number puzzles are things like “How many genders are there?”
The correct answer, of course, is “Fuck you, JK Rowling, that’s how many.”
So crazy that a woman who liberally employed the Polyjuice Potion in her novels and had ghosts who would just wander through the restrooms to talk to you would take some of the most insanely conservative positions on changing your appearance or who should be allowed in the toilet.
Remember when Hagrid assigned his dragon the wrong gender at hatching?
Had to jog my memory, because I haven’t read these books in nearly 20 years.
But yeah. I think the Rowling of the mid-90s was relatively chill and fairly progressive, given the tone of her writing. It wasn’t until she got Disney-fied (or, I guess, Warner Brothers’d) that she took a turn. The novels really take a dive in book 5 and her political opinions just get nastier and nastier after that.
The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows. And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies. What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact (remember Winky?) that Shaun described in his video essay.
She has been outspoken on the fact that her positions are basically due to personal trauma and nothing else
Why would you encourage more people to be sexually assaulted as a response to your own history?
“Billionaire has shitty beliefs. In other news, the weather in London is still complete ass.”
Jesus Christ this book series is fucking stupid
It is but I’m not sure why they called the author a witch instead of a shitty author. For whatever stupid detail you find, the writing is 5x more awkward
Even a dragon would make more sense because of the wealth hoarding
It’s just like an izekai but for English reading children.
Isekai is nothing new. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are all “isekai”. JK is a special kind of bad writer.
It’s just fun, it’s not serious or hard fantasy. It could be much worse, a lot of people read Ayn Rand and think its good.
Almost like it was written with kids and preteens as the intended audience …
what type of pervert writes a book like that
I’m sure Hogwarts also covered general education stuff but that would be boring to us so they focused on the magic stuff. That’s my theory though.
They literally go through the class schedule in each book. General studies are not in it.
Can you imagine how absolutely ignorant the average Hogwarts student must be then?
Wizards are, as a whole, pretty damn stupid in that universe to be fair
What is the purpose of a rubber duck?
Yeah, none of them seem to be aware of guns. You now how often dark wizards do spells in the books to protect themselves against projectiles? Never. They never do a spell like that, so far as I know.
As far as I know, the Protego spell protects against physical forces. The reason no one uses projectiles (they certainly could catapult stuff around with spells as well) is probably because it’s common knowledge that it does nothing.
Bullets are pretty quick though. Quicker than what it takes to spell Protego
Yeah. I a 1v1 the gun wins.
But Protego is something that you can simply have up around you whenever.
They literally go through the class schedule in each book
No they don’t?
Boring? This is the same universe where wizards canonically defecated in the streets and used fecal vanishing spells.
However, when Hogwarts’ plumbing became more elaborate in the eighteenth century (this was a rare instance of wizards copying Muggles, because hitherto they simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence), the entrance to the Chamber was threatened, being located on the site of a proposed bathroom.
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/chamber-of-secrets
Hogwarts was in India all along and we just didn’t know it.
Im surprised that’s so controversial. I would expect wizards to do exactly that if it wasn’t for modern plumbing, I mean, people used to shit in pots and dump it out their window into the street in the morning. Or crap in a cold and smelly hole inside a basic wooden shed out in their yard.
If you have magic at that point why would you not instead delete it afterwards, considering the alternatives?
Does vanishing feces mean is deleted though or is it going to end up in the walls of buildings like Arby’s wrappers left behind by construction workers?
I think there’s a throwaway line in a book that a wizard discovered vanishing things sent them to another dimension.
Imagine it landed in our dimension and people are trying to make sense of it.
“Honey, I think the dog shat on the chandelier…”
Isn’t arithmetic a class in Hogwarts and just a fancy word for maths (not a native speaker)? I think only Hermione takes it though and it’s only mentioned in the books.
arithmeticarithmancy
source :
Arithmancy | Harry Potter Wiki
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Arithmancy
I mean, there must be a reason why wizards are constantly perplexed by muggle technology.
And why goblins have to do their accounting for them.
could hogwarts defeng itself against modern weapons? like missils and shit?
Yeah. Easily.
Reducto or any of a dozen other spells that make shit explode, magical barriers, simply transfiguring the weapons to something else… telekinesis. Simply not being there.
And before you add “what if they were surprised…” …. It’s possible, but remember how shocked Hagrid was about the lie the Dursley’s told Potter? “A car crash?! A Car CRASH?! Kill lily and James potter?!….”
I don’t know. I’ve always thought a sniper could have taken out Voldemort. Far away, camouflaged, and the bullet gets there faster than the sound. It’s a reaction time thing.
I would expect Voldemort to have protective spells keeping things like that from happening.
If it were that easy to kill a witch or wizzard… then there’s lots of ways to go about that. He wouldn’t have needed a special wand to fight Harry. he’d just fling a ginormous rock out of nowhere.
Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks. There’s the whomping willow, which they can’t just cast a force field against. There were the spiders and the centaurs in the forest. The big three headed dog. That devil’s something plant. And if I recall, Voldemort didn’t realize the caretaker had come into the house until he was in the hallway and Nagini saw him. Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I read those.
Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.
And for what it’s worth, I think a sniper could take out a Jedi, too.
Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks…
the killing curse is probably simply more efficient for the task at hand. It’s also by and large, more discrete. In any case, all the things you listed were evaded by a couple of poorly taught kids. Like literally… children. Fluffy, the devil’s vine thing, (along with all the other challenges from teachers)… one of those kids had exactly a year’s worth of experience with magic. I could also kill an M1A1 Abrams with a rock if I stuffed it in the right place. (I’m thinking exhaust.). Doesn’t mean i want to fight an Abrams with a rock. or… at all.
again for surprise …[Hagrid’s insistence a mere car crash woudln’t kill the Potters[(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoeSuboKeBk). They could probably literally just poof into smoke before a bullet ever fully breaks the skin.
Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.
Jedi use the lightsaber specifically because they’re taught the Force isn’t for killing. They just love running around in bathrobes waving their glowbats around. (stop giggling. no seriously. stop giggling. Okay fine. giggle. a little. mace’s has a vibrating lenses.)
The Sith have used the force to mow down entire armies, though. for example Maul running amok on a venator. still, the Sith use lightsabers as a symbol- invoking fear and terror, which further powers their dark-side natures. They also use lightsabers when it’s more efficient. (hurling rocks is… taxing, yes?)
I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.
I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.
The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”
I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.
Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!
Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.
Obviously, JK Rowling was not a tactical mastermind.
However in the universe she created, any powerful wizard worth a damn would simply keep protective shields up all the time, especially against such simple things like “fast objects hitting them”.
Protego seems to be doing a lot with barely any effort to cast. Fred&George even create permanently enchanted clothing with Protego on it.
Reaction time isn’t really relevant when you are good at divination and ultra sensory perception.
He came from muggle land, so he is probably aware of guns. He could probably easily made his skin bullet proof with some spell. It’s not like wizards can’t invent new spells and magic. They just almost always seem to choose not to. I think the vast majority of wizards are lazy hacks.
I also think it’s just supposed to be hard to make new magic and the spells that are common were built to be common.
For example, it is possible for anyone to write a new program for their phone. How many people actually can or do? How many people, with some training, can use most of not all of the programs that others have built to be productive.
How hard can it be? The Weasleys are all adept at it. The mother showcases spells and items never seen before or again in the story. The father turns muggle objects into working magical objects, the most famous being the car that can fly. The twins create three stories worth of magical objects for their store.
Maybe your right and the Weasleys, Snape and Voldemort are some of the most intelligent wizards.
Sure but anyone can win any fight if they have position and prep time that the other party doesn’t: under the same logic Voldy can easily kill any sniper so long as he knows there’s one (and in a war, there is one). Reminder, at least in the movies he doesn’t actually need to aim for Crucio, and he can manually and literally laser crush a castle-wide energy barrier .
Ok but you’d have to have pretty fast reaction times to transfigure a bullet just sayin
pretty fast reaction time to not die in a car crash, too. and your forgetting the part about wards and protection spells just stopping things cold.
I’m not familiar with the series, what’s muggle technology?
Muggle is a racial slur used by magic-able people to refer to magic disabled people.
Not a slur, you’re thinking of mudblood
The preferred term is NaMP - Not a Magical Person/Non-Magical Person. You could also say “Person of Non-Magic,” but it’s hard to pronounce “ponm.”
There can be more than one slur. Muggle is debatable I believe.
Idk I can’t remember anyone in Harry Potter using it as a straight up slur, the worst I can think of is some people use it in a rude way like “The Blacks” or “The Gays”. I haven’t read them in a long time tho, I just remember mudblood being a slur and muggle being the accepted term, even by muggleborn magic users
What’s wrong about saying the blacks or the gays? That’s just refering to a specific group of people. Only thing I can see as problematic is the generalization that follows but that’s always the case when talking about groups.
People take offense to using adjectives describing a group of people as a noun. For example “the black community” or “people who are gay” describe a subset (describe a portion of the overall community,) whereas “the blacks” or “the gays” describe a distinct set (and imply that group as an “other”)
That’s because Mudblood is a magic user born from a Muggle family. A different term from Muggle itself. Pretty sure Muggle is an accepted term in the overall society (it’s used in the Ministry’s Department name for example), except from a few ‘activists’ you might hear of.
I believe there’s someone like that in Hogwarts Legacy as well.
Muggle isnt a slur, just as wizard isnt a slur. It’s not a derogatory term. It’s just their word for non-magic people while non-magic people use the word wizard or witch.
Non-magical people’s tech. Aka our technology.
Non magical people living in the real world. It’s you. You’re a muggle.
You don’t know that
I do know it, via magic. You can’t prove I don’t know, because you’re a muggle.
Muggles is wizard slang for non-magical human beings. Like Darren on Bewitched would be a muggle. He cooks his food using an oven instead of magic. The oven is muggle tech.
Although that could also be them being perplexed by the fact that muggles did it with no magic at all.
Imagine us discovering a species that developed computers and tech just like ours, but using neither transistors nor electricity.
The series would have ended much sooner if Harry had brought an AK47 to hogwarts
Outstanding
Typical Koldovstoretz graduates
To be fair, I suspect the average adult in real life probably only remembers, and uses, 5th grade math.
I bet I couldn’t help a 5th grader with their math homework.
Most people couldn’t, but that’s mostly to do with the way math is taught differently… (“New math” is better, fight me!)
can you add fractions?
Facts
Source: self
lol. I don’t remember a single math, English or any other class mentioned.
There was Arithmancy, the Harry Potter wiki says that it was using numbers to predict the future. It was an elective and Harry didn’t take it.
The only other class that would have had math would be Astronomy, which was a required class for all students. The students are required to make star charts and such… Seems like rote memorization was the only thing taught. The wink says that the end of year 5 tests was filling in a blank star chart from memory.
They might get some English pointers in the dozens of essays they wrote, but since essays are graded on the length of the scroll… it becomes questionable.
I think everyone hated alchemy not because of Snape alone, but because it involves math too. Scaling the resulting doze of a potion, balancing it’s effects, predicting chemi-magical reactions of ingredients - it’s all math. And Severus was portrayed just like an average techie teaching a class of humame arts students.
Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe
Please stop.
JK sees the continued support of her work as proof that her views are supported. She is doing active harm to people lives. I know it’s common to say seperate the art from the artist, but that only applies to the dead. Rowling is alive and using her profits to write hateful proganda and restrict healthcare from an already marginalized group. I’m not ever going to tell someone what they can and can’t read, just please recognize the harm it does by promoting her. It’s the same as promoting the works of David Duke.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for your comment. That’s one of our main threads, “On the sensitive topic of being a Harry Potter fan while acknowledging JKR’s transphobia” https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9633657, quoting https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-jk-rowling-transphobia-essay-49214964
Still, there may be a way to enjoy Harry Potter as a trans person or ally. Over the years, many fans have found creative ways to engage with the series’s magic while also acknowledging its creator’s bigotry. In her paper “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling,” Jennifer Duggan, an associate professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway — says that it’s possible to interpret the text of Harry Potter itself in ways that would certainly horrify its writer. “My central thesis—one which has also been argued by other academics like Thomas Pugh and David Wallace — is that the Harry Potter novels are deeply queer,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I mean this in both senses of the term: they champion nonnormativity through the contrast of the ‘perfectly normal’ Dursleys and Harry, and they are, at their heart, a story about a boy with an ‘abnormality’ (as the Dursleys call his magic) who comes out of his cupboard under the stairs and discovers and finds and affinity for a hidden, colourful, queer world. I take this argument further to argue that the novels are easily read through a trans lens, since there is a focus in many of the books on shapeshifting, including several cross-gendered transformations.”
Fandom, she adds, can provide spaces where Harry Potter fans can explore the series’s queer undercurrents while celebrating their own sexualities. “From what I have observed, I have concluded that for the most part, the Harry Potter fandom continues to offer queer and trans fans a positive space,” she tells POPSUGAR. “The two main trends I have seen in fan works are an ‘answer hate with love’ reaction, in which fans focus on trans positivity, and so-called ‘spitefic,’ which are works that are framed as revenge on Rowling for the hurt she has caused. These works are usually trans-positive, too. That said, I fully understand why some fans feel they can no longer engage with the texts in any way.”
Link to the research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-021-09446-9
This response doesn’t address the legislation aspect of the critique. It’s an excellent response for if she were already dead and gone, but what about the harm that comes from supporting her now? Surely you have something to say about that, don’t you?
Hello,
You can see some initiatives that take the books away from her, such as this one
A trans artist resells Harry Potter books with new covers that omit Rowling’s name. Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans, garnered major attention when they began a project of buying secondhand Harry Potter books and replacing the covers with redesigned versions that don’t have J.K. Rowling’s name. Flom then resells the books for £140, according to Yahoo! News. In a TikTok from February 2022, Flom said, “My aim with this project is to engage critically and give an option to people who do still want to enjoy Harry Potter without supporting J.K. Rowling.”
A link to the version from this person, they look quite nice: https://laurflom.format.com/harry-potter-rebind
You mentioned legislation, I think that is an interesting point. If the books (and the HP universe in general) are so detrimental, shouldn’t they be condemned by countries court for xenophobia and transphobia? It seems strange to me that there are still 2 major amusement parks Harry Potter themed in the US, and a third one in London if you count the former shooting set, with thousands of visitors every year. That just seems so strange compared to the accusations the books face.
Thank you for the reply, but I don’t see how that is relevant, you didn’t link to a queer fan fiction community.
Linking to a cis author who said that some fan fiction theoritcally helps some queer folk instead of listening to the trans community that is actively being hurt in substative ways by the celebration of Rowlings current work, not fan fictions, is sort of indicative of how much you actually care about this topic. Your link is filled promotion for her shows, art and discussion of Rowlings work. I’m sure you have been criticized before, but I feel like you are using an one-size-fits-all copy/paste as cover instead of actually engaging with what I, and the trans community, are saying.
I’m not going to argue, this isn’t how I wish to spend my time. All I can do is please ask you to stop and hope one day you will rethink what you’re doing.
The admin of the instance we host the community on is a queer Jewish man, who expressed his feeling about having that community on his instance in this comment: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/6746512
He is still okay with us having that community over there.
I don’t really engage in this community because of the discomfort Harry Potter generally brings me. I was honestly a bit relieved when it died.
The whole thing just upsets me honestly. Seeing the conflict is painful.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
there’s a big difference between consuming public domain work made by awful people who no longer receive profit whilst consuming work by a woman who is actively engaging in political campaigns to make trans peoples lives worse with the profit she still receives.
Which makes it very different than Poe, Doyle or Seuess that were named in that thread. She is alive and well, and using her platform and fan base to produce more hateful texts. (Bad Blood)
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism. His discomfort at the antisemitic tropes are entirely understandable, and while that is not something I am going to claim hurts me, it does seem to hurt Gabe.
As I said before, I’m not going to force you to do anything. Just please understand how you continued celebration of Rowling and her work is hurting others.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
I reached out to him in private, I wasn’t going to copy our conversation as it is private.
I was very ready to move that community elsewhere, and I refrained from posting for a week before getting Gabe’s approval.
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism.
That’s the first time I hear the treatment of Rita Skeeter is transphobic. James, Sirius and McGonagall are also able to shapeshift, and they are positive characters in the books.
For the house elves, the whole SPEW plot is designed to both make Ron (and the whole Wizard word as a whole) look stupid and bigoted, and Hermione a bit too self-righteous, as teenagers can be.
Relevant reference: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/122283/why-did-rowling-seemingly-make-light-of-the-house-elf-situation
I’ve seen several times that the fact that the society isn’t changed by the end of the last book as a critic, but do all work of fictions have to uphold their societies? Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books, and Brigderton is as classist as it can be.
Plot twist: jk is a selfhating queer and her subconsciousness wrote Harry Potter to break free without disappointing her self hating parents.
That’s an interesting theory. He literally comes out of a closet, after all.
So that would put him only a couple years ahead of most republicans
They have arithmancy but Harry never took it AFAIK
Hermione mentioned in the first book that wizards tend to absolutely suck at things that are typically Muggle, like logic, so it follows that they probably suck at math too.
That’s probably why wizards don’t run the bank 😂
Logically, that does follow, but we’re talking about wizards here.
True, but their methods of learning do not differ significantly from that of muggles. They still need to take classes the same way we do, and this would need to learn maths and logic the same way too.
Whoosh?
I wonder if she struggles with reading as well considering the most advanced thing she’s probably read is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
She successfully brewed a complicated polyjuice potion that took months to make by just reading and following the instructions in the book when she was 12. She reads just fine.
But all wizard books are scribbled in crayon
???
Reading is very common at Hogwarts and the wider wizarding world. Hogwarts has an extensive library, and most of their communications and news media are done over written mediums.
Contrast that to maths where the hardest thing most wizards would realistically have to do is basic money operations. Made even harder by their bonkers monetary system.
I think the OP meant that if they all stopped learning maths at 10, and there was no English class at Hogwarts, they probably stopped learning to read at 10 as well (well, the Muggles anyway, there’s no mention of how the Wizards learn anything before 11 I don’t think?).
There wouldn’t be additional English literature classes, sure, but by age 11 it’s mostly just practice and looking up words you don’t know anyway.
I think that’s a bit over simplified. Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare? There’s a reason we continue to teach English until a child leaves secondary/high school.
Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare?
The bigger question is, do they need to understand Shakespeare?
Shakespeare is important in UK Muggle culture, not so much elsewhere, including the wizarding world which very much has their own cultural icons.
They probably aren’t getting their spells from books that old either. The reason we don’t transpose Shakespeare to modern language is the loss of artistic intent in the process. Something that wouldn’t apply to purely factual books like a spell book.
Besides, they are expected to learn Latin; that’s where their spells come from.
arithmancy - which is pseudomaths in a sense…
