In my mind a lot of death could have been prevented if wizards were more open to muggle society. Steal a bunch of smoke grenades and gas masks and you defeat the Death Eaters easily.
Well, yeah. Getting rid of Hitler as soon as he clearly became a problem, for instance.
Yunno, I have this sort-of head canon about the wizarding world in the Harry Potter stories: that the magical aren’t just going incognito and keeping to themselves, the wizarding world is almost literally a parallel dimension– just one with substantial overlap with our mundane Muggle world. We already know that entire pockets of spacetime can be established magically, maybe that’s MUCH more extensive than most people take away from the stories.
I dunno- he likely would have become a martyr and one of his cronies would take over.
It’s mentioned in the books that technology doesn’t work right in the vicinity of too much magic. What precisely constitutes “technology” is a good question, but IIRC, a scuba kit is the specific example of something that wouldn’t work, and that seems like about a comparable level of tech as a sniper rifle.
I thought that was electricity only.
More than one. I recall a scene in the book The Silicon Mage, where the main villain the wizard Suraklin has been traveling between his world and ours as part of a plan to achieve immortality and ultimate power. There’s a scene where the opposition has shown up to attack him in his lair between worlds where magic is largely useless for fighting (since it needs to be used to just stay alive). They figure that without his magic a bunch of soldiers with swords can handle him easily. That is, until Suraklin suddenly steps out of a door in front of them.
Quite sensibly, somewhere along the line, Suraklin had acquired a submachine gun.
How does a crossbow count on the tech scale? Or, say, a half dozen folks, each with a crossbow. Avada Pincushiona
In The Sound of Music, Nazi mook Herr Zeller sent a patrol to escort Baron Von Trapp to Bremerhaven to be commissioned into the German Navy. But first Zeller allowed the family to sing at the festival, where they escaped after their final number.
Why didn’t Zeller just post a guard backstage to keep that from happening?
Incompetence? If your escorting people against their will somewhere then letting them do a performance shows a lack of professionalism in itself, screwing up by not posting a guard is just more of the same.
This is a case where it’s not necessarily a plot hole, but just a Nazi being incompetent. Which was not exactly unknown.
Because a musical that ended right then and there at the festival would be too short?
(Johnny Carson) “I did not know that!”
Wait, that’s a dodecahedron?
Ok, I’ll get my coat.
Doc Hollywood could have had his car shipped across the country, and just taken a flight to his new job in Beverly Hills.
In A Few Good Men, all Colonel Jack Nicholson has to do is say “No, I didn’t order the code red.” Boom, Tom Cruise gets court marshalled.
And a lot of headaches in E.T. could have been avoided if they had just told their mom that they found an alien.
“You killed half of my enemies already and you leaving Oz with the shoes will take the other half’s power with it. Suits me. Bitch, you can leave now. Click your heels together.” Glinda, 10 minutes in.
Despite pretending to be desperate to leave the town, once he saw Julie Warner coming out of the lake he was hooked like a fish.
Nah, the Wicked Witch of the West still had a lot of magic power, not to mention a chanting ‘Swiss Guard’ style army protecting her and a fleet of flying monkey minions. Glinda the ‘Good’ Witch wasn’t about to take the WWotW on herself. So she, in cahoots with the Wizard, used Dorothy as cannon fodder, on the off chance she succeeded in taking the WWotW out. In the much more likely event she failed, Glinda could claim plausible deniability.
Dorothy should have gone rogue double-agent and made a deal with the WWotW to help her get home in exchange for intel on what the Wizard and Glinda were planning for her, and returning the slippers. After all, the WWotW just wanted to get her dead sister’s belongings back. Not such an unreasonable request. Since the ruby slippers did not follow her back to Kansas, they probably stayed in Oz after she clicked them together.
Sure, but she very easily could have failed and lost the shoes to the witch. It wasn’t like she gave Dorothy any help, she had to find friends from unlikely places all on her own.
But hey, Glinda could have just splashed some of that Munchkin City Center pond water on the Witch and it would be over without Flying Monkey civil war.
There was a webcomic (the art was sub par) about a meeting of Alice In Wonderland, Oz, Peter Pan, and Mary Poppins. As I said, the art was crap. But the writing was great! One of the first things we learn is that indeed Glinda is a selfish schemer who lied to Dorothy about a variety of things and used her to fulfill her own goals.
It is still online. I do get a 'Not Secure" warning in my address bar though.
ETA
Are we going by the Judy Garland film? Baum’s original books? Wicked? The abilities and motivations of folks in Oz change significantly based on the answer.
Yeah, the very fact that Glinda made Dorothy go through the whole quest rather than just tell her to click her heels together and wish for home right from the start is, to me, prima facie evidence that she was shamelessly manipulating Dorothy for her own ends.
That comic was by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian.