Harry Potter and why its world building is so boring? - Avada Kedavra vs M16

Save the Loli said:
Remember, the good guy wizards think it's totally okay to sentence people to a prison on a remote island guarded by giant flying zombie-looking things who mentally torture them their entire stay and are apparently evil but follow orders because they like torturing people or something.
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The good guys explicitly don't like them. The government is about as incompetent and corrupt as it is irl, but probably less evil. One of the things I've seen Progs whine about is that series mostly portrays the government in a negative light.
Save the Loli said:
which begs the question of why the good guys would even bother hiring them as guards.
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The government uses them as guards. Dementors stopped being used once the good guys took over the government. The dementors already existed on the island and the past government had the brilliant idea of building a prison there. My fan theory is that they were bribing the dementors to behave by giving them criminals to feed on. Dementors are immortal and can't be killed, are capable of breeding, and the only way of protecting oneself from them is one of the most difficult spells in existence. Everyone is scared of them and for good reason.
 
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Is there any alternatives to this whole magic school expansive lore that was created after HP, that does it better than HP? I know Fate/TYPE-MOON has a magic association with a school but it was never the focus of the story.

So for people that want lore, what are the alternatives?
 
Registration said:
Is there any alternatives to this whole magic school expansive lore that was created after HP, that does it better than HP? I know Fate/TYPE-MOON has a magic association with a school but it was never the focus of the story.

So for people that want lore, what are the alternatives?
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I can't think of anything. Honestly I'm not sure a lore that makes sense is possible. Essentially, if an unrealistic lore does not make sense, but reality makes no sense, then even a realistic lore can't make sense. How many people think they'd be able to convince the standard reader of the year 1999 that the current world makes sense? If you remove the realism requirements, you can probably carefully study a real-life world view subject to intense real-world scrutiny you don't believe in, and then regularize it, then stuff your story in there. Never seen it done though.
 
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Vecr said:
I can't think of anything. Honestly I'm not sure a lore that makes sense is possible. Essentially, if an unrealistic lore does not make sense, but reality makes no sense, then even a realistic lore can't make sense. How many people think they'd be able to convince the standard reader of the year 1999 that the current world makes sense? If you remove the realism requirements, you can probably carefully study a real-life world view subject to intense real-world scrutiny you don't believe in, and then regularize it, then stuff your story in there. Never seen it done though.
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Well yeah, I guess the realism isn't the answer. You know that bit that hogwarts had no bathroom because they would just pluft the shit with magic? I like that. When you have tools that trivialize certain things, you have to think outside the box and develop stuff further from the normal thought mainframe, for example: lets say that instead of pissing in bathrooms or taking showers, they use magic to clean themselves off and add all the dirt and piss into some place to be used as materials to magecraft. It is completely out of the normal thought but these kind of little details give a breath to the fictional world. So realism isn't the answer, but these details and with more magic bullshit getting used can eventually turn a fictional world appart when not careful.
 
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I'm sorry to bump this, but couldn't figure out where it goes. Because they had to translate Voldemort's name into other languages, "Tom Marvolo Riddle" didn't work. In French, his name is "Tom Elvis Jedusor" for "Je suis Voldemort." Tom got his middle name from his Grandfather, who was a wizard. I now declare that Elvis was a wizard, and this explains everything! Boring world building, my butt!
 
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Because we see Harry Potter as a LotR-esque series, when it's akin to The Hobbit. It's written for children with decently strong character building. It does world building but its all done through Harry's eyes, you experience tidbits of the Wizarding world as he does, that's why there is no grand sweeping narrative.
 
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Sho'nuff said:
Because we see Harry Potter as a LotR-esque series, when it's akin to The Hobbit. It's written for children with decently strong character building. It does world building but its all done through Harry's eyes, you experience tidbits of the Wizarding world as he does, that's why there is no grand sweeping narrative.
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That's just how it started. Pretty clear that by Book 4 or 5 Rowling wanted the grand sweeping narrative. Call it "growing up with the audience" or the whole thing getting out of hand, it's clear there's a lot of a tonal shift about halfway through.
 
People have already answered this in detail over the last 15 pages, but could you imagine if this was supposed to be in the real world? In a supposed real world.

There would be so much murder, magical CCTV cameras all over the place as a measure after the complete ravage and destruction caused by not only teenage sociopaths, but anyone else if given the opportunity.

Even if it didn't get to that stage. Imagine Harry turning someone into a rat and putting them in a blender, boom, done! No more problems, there was a problem here, now there isn't.

Like you have artifacts like that clock for time-travel that a random student had (Hermione), how would this not be absolute chaos? It's cartoonish. Harry Potter in real life would be either a dystopian world of constant surveillance & a totalitarian system, or an apocalyptic world of death & constant threats.
 
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Urban Fantasy by and large has terrible world building. The whole point is that it takes place in the "real" world.
 
We Are The Witches said:
Like you have artifacts like that clock for time-travel that a random student had (Hermione), how would this not be absolute chaos? It's cartoonish. Harry Potter in real life would be either a dystopian world of constant surveillance & a totalitarian system, or an apocalyptic world of death & constant threats.
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Well, yeah? Look up the "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom, one of Yudkowsky's contractors. Yudkowsky put that into his Harry Potter fan fiction in a late chapter.

The "time turners" don't let you change the past though, so I'm not sure if they'd be asymmetrical support for the threat side. Someone can go back, under an invisibility cloak or as a small transformed animal, and catch a whole lot that can't be caught in real life. See the book The Light of Other Days for more ideas about that.

In general it's not all that interesting, because almost all authors will ignore stuff like what you talk about in their works. Cynical hard Sci-Fi authors and some of the better techno-thriller authors can be an exception, but it's rarer than you'd think given their job description.
 
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