• @EdibleFriend
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    859 months ago

    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.

    • @Jocarnail
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      419 months ago

      I think a bullet may even be faster than a wizard casting protego.

      • Khrux
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • @x4740N
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          179 months ago

          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

          • Khrux
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            69 months ago

            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.

        • Roflmasterbigpimp
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          9 months ago

          I’ll just use my bundle of sticks, my wand strap to Wingardium Leviosa you straight into the sun.

          I wish he did this. This is Gold!

        • @x4740N
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          39 months ago

          Is this in the books or the movies

          • @EdibleFriend
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            79 months ago

            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.

        • @buddascrayon
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          39 months ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          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.

          • Khrux
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            39 months ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              19 months ago

              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.

      • @EdibleFriend
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        89 months ago

        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

    • @[email protected]
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      119 months ago

      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.”

      • @EdibleFriend
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        69 months ago

        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.

        • Blyfh
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          19 months ago

          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.

  • @BloodSlut
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    459 months ago

    counterspell this you filthy casual

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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    9 months ago

    Rowling was great for branding, but not good for internally consistent worldbuilding. Hogwarts has anti-tech wards, but its never specified whether a Glock 9, a Bic rollerball, A CANON EOS 35MM, or a TI-84 Graphing Calculator would work. Each of them work based on widely differing physical mechanics. Are they independently warded, or are they waved away by the category tech?

    The common consensus regarding the HP books as they are is that in a muggle war, the international community would quickly dominate, and magical secrets would fall into the hands of billionaires like Bezos and Musk, who could muster far greater cruelty and misery than Voldemort’s ambitions, all in the name of profit.

    The reason there’s a codefied masquerade is to keep magic exclusively in the hands of less creative more sensible minds.

    • @[email protected]
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      29 months ago

      If I remember correctly it was mentioned somewhere that magic causes electrical / electronic devices to malfunction.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        29 months ago

        I remember in Prisoner of Azkaban the anti-tech field around Hogwarts was briefly mentioned, though much ado was made over Arthur Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia which he wasn’t supposed to enchant but totally did. Arthur’s department in the MoM is about regulating intersections between magic and tech, which implies there are problems that require legal prohibitions. My read is the laws are overly harsh and not well enforced, except when the state or some official wants to make someone go away.

        That said, again, Rowling wasn’t great at consistency in the canon, so it remains up to the writer if and how electronics might be affected by ensorcellments, and how they might be integrated.

  • @aluminium
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    249 months ago

    Pulls out the remote unaliver

  • Neato
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    209 months ago

    As a reader of a certain web serial, watching her deal with not being an innate magic user by using spell cards was very fun. That world didn’t know what hit them.

    • @x4740N
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      39 months ago

      I haven’t watched the full series yet and still need to since it’s just sitting on my hard drive

      But I have always wondered if there is one sigil or multiple combined sigils that could basically act as a medium for luz to use magic normally

      • Cicraft
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        19 months ago

        Oh boy are you in for a ride