Logistical Problems with Harry Potter (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Spoilers galore:

So I’ve read the first four books, and while they’re real page-turners, and overall great, fun, engrossing books, I have some issues:

  1. How many wizards are there? Hogwarts feels small, and every adult in the books seems to know each other, and be “high up” in the wizarding world, but at the Quiddich World Cup there were 100,000 wizards! Speaking of which…

  2. Quiddich is dumb - just poorly conceived. Matches that last days? HOW? Catching the Snitch when your team is behind? WHY?

  3. What’s Voldemort’s goal? He seems to only be after controlling all of England’s wizards. He has about 12 supporters that come running when he snaps. This parallels the problem in point 1. How much can he really control? Is he after the world, or just the EU, or what?

  4. In book 4, Barty Crouch Jr. made the TriWizard Tournament a Portkey. Why didn’t he just make Harry Potter’s, I don’t know, toothbrush? a portkey? The end.

What stuff bugs you about the Harry Potter books?

2

Okay, I’ll give these a shot. Trust me, these are questions that have been brought up and hashed over about a million times in the fandom. There’s no real answers, but here’s what the fans have speculated:

  1. Yeah, okay…Jo Rowling isn’t the best with numbers. She has stated in interviews that about 1000 students attend Hogwarts, which makes no sense when you consider that there are only 8 students in Harry’s year in Gryffindor. If you push this up to an average of 10 students per House per year, you still only get a total of 280. Possible explanations:
    a.) Harry isn’t the most observant chap. Maybe there are other Gryffindors in other dorms that we just don’t get to meet because Harry doesn’t know them.
    b.) Maybe Harry’s class and the classes above him are unusually small. Maybe a lot of children were killed in Voldie War I, or maybe people stopped having kids out of fear. Is there a baby boom in the classes below Harry, maybe?
    c.) Could be that Gryffindor is an “exclusive” house…hard to get into. Maybe Hufflepuff has tons of students to make up for the missing numbers.

  2. Why would someone catch the snitch if they’ll lose? Well, we have two examples of this happening in the books: In GOF, Victor Krum catches the snitch in the Quidditch World Cup because he knows the Ireland Chasers are way too good…his team will never catch up. As one of the characters says, he wanted to end it on his own terms. He wanted to keep it from being a total blowout. The second time it happens is in Book 5, so I’ll spoiler box it for you (this reveals a major plot point, so beware!):

Ginny Weasley catches the snitch to end the game against Hufflepuff. In this case, again, the team in question was losing miserably. Harry, Fred & George have been kicked off the team, Ron the new Keeper is suffering from the I’m-Not-Good-Enoughs and the Beaters were atrocious. Ginny took the snitch when she could, to keep the points as close as possible. In this case, it really does make a difference since the winner of the Quidditch Cup is determined by who has the most overall total points at the end of the season.

So there are (rare) occasions when it makes sense to catch the Snitch early. As to Quidditch just being dumb in general? shrug Maybe. I don’t really care. It’s still fun to read about, especially with Lee Jordan commentating. That’s going to be a sorely missed feature in Book 6!

  1. Well, I believe Voldemort’s ultimate goal is to rid the (entire) world of muggle-borns and destroy or at least enslave all Muggles. Simple as that. Right now, though, his main goal in life is to destroy Harry Potter. Once that’s done, he’ll focus on the technicalities of world domination. After all, he also wants to be immortal, so he’s got all the time he’ll ever need to conquer first England, then Europe, etc.

  2. Again, no explanation given in the books, but we can guess. Portkeys are regulated (we find this out in Order of the Phoenix). Hogwarts has uber-security. (No apparition, etc.) If Crouch!Moody had created an unauthorized Portkey before the Fourth Task, it would have been detected.

Gah. I really need to get out more, but I’m simply addicted to Harry Potter. I highly recommend Book Five. It’s very dark, and I was depressed for about a week after reading it, but IMHO it’s the best of the bunch so far. Anybody else think these are no longer children’s books?

3

Well, of course, the real answer is that Rowling didn’t have all the details of magic worked out right at the start of the series, so the details don’t add up. There are plenty of occasions where new magic tricks are introduced without any explanation as to why they weren’t used before. For instance, in Sorcerer’s Stone, once Dumbledore realizes that he was tricked into leaving Hogwarts, why doesn’t he use a portkey or floo powder to return immediately and stop Voldermort from even getting close to the stone? (And even if portkeys are regulated, surely Dumbledore would be allowed to have one.)

4

Quidditch is seriously broken. Very poorly designed.

5

Well Oreo answered most questions pretty well so i’ll add just a few things.

I have to pass on the ‘how many Wizards’ question. Roughly 1000, divided by the number of houses (4) gives us roughly 250 kids per house. 250 divided by the number of different years or grades(7), leaves roughly 36 (rounded up) kids per year in each house. If that is the case, Harry certainly isn’t noticing everyone around him. Also, there is only one Gryffindor dorm. 250 kids in the one dorm, how does Harry avoid these people?

As regards the Portkey - Crouch Jr. was disguised as Moody, Moody seemed trusted by Dumbledore - so therefore he probably had some kind of access to the TriWizard Tournament cup - I doubt he would have been able to come up with a reasonable excuse that would give him equal access to Potter’s toothbrush, or other personal items that he would be likely to touch.

As for Quidditch matches lasting for days, ever heard of Test Cricket? A test match is 5 days long.

I don’t think Quidditch is in any way more or less silly than any ‘real’ sports that humans have invented. When you examine most sports there are always a few rules or concepts that stand out as slightly stupid or meaningless - but that’s because, like Quidditch, they’re games. They’re for fun - not for close examination and analysis.

ITR Champion - No offense intended, but I believe Rowling has stated several times that she had pretty much the whole plot and the world the plot happens in worked out before she even put pen to paper. Good question about Dumbledore and the Portkey though, I’d like someone to explain that.

BTW, what does the ITR stand for?
One thing that bugs me - and I wish I could remember which book this is in - is that there’s a narrative line (I quote roughly):

“…Harry quickly picked up the Invisibilty Cloak and shoved it in his pocket…”

What? That thing is huge. I think if Harry had a pocket big enough to fit that in, it would have been something worth alerting the reader of.

I’ll try and find a page reference for you. And a more accurate quote.

6

No. Quidditch is just plain stupid. Like the stories, but the game’s scoring system is illogical to the extreme.

7

You mean, like tennis?

8

I presume that school Quidditch is slightly different to a professional game, in that the Snitch is a lot easier to catch. Thus normally there’s plenty of time for the scores to be that far apart. In practice of course you’ve got to wonder why any team which doesn’t have Harry Potter bothers turning up, but hey. (my issue is that he’s allowed to have an international-quality broom, kinda harsh that).

I do like the baby boom theory, although we really should have had that mentioned in Book 3 or 4 with a huge class of First years. Alternatively, maybe Hogwarts is too expensive for most kids, and they’re home-schooled or go to tutors or small schools or whatever. The idea of Harry just not noticing the hundreds of other Gryffindors did amuse me though.

Voldie seems to have major influence all over Europe, and presumably the dozen or so Death Eaters we’ve met are those both important enough to be contacted and powerful\cunning enough to avoid prison. Remember that they could use Imperio on people to effectively increase their numbers.

9

I very much enjoyed the books, but the question that always bugged me is this: How can there be “poor” wizards? And by poor, I mean Weasley poor–i.e., shabby clothing, hand-me-downs, second-hand books, cracked dishes, etc.

IOW, why wouldn’t everything be magically turned into first-rate, shining stuff? I’m not sure what use there is for money at all, considering the whole wizard universe.

Again, I enjoyed the books, and I don’t really mind if well-told stories have somewhat illogical givens. Perhaps there is an explanation?

10

Regarding question 4: Voldemort, like all super-villans, has a penchant for the dramatic. It is much more dramatic to have Harry disapeer at the end of the tournament, while surrounded by powerful wizards from all over Europe, than it is to have him disapeer while cleaning his teeth. It’s a bit like the whole discussion between Dr Evil and Scott Evil in Austin Powers: So you’re going to leave him alone with a couple of dumb henchman to guard him, while he’s about to be killed in a very slow and overly-complicated way? Why don’t you just shoot him? I have a gun, I’ll go get it now." I know that’s not the right quote, but you get the general gist.

11

As for the number of students in the school – I’m not big on numbers myself, so I never sweated that much. However, in the last book the point was reiterated that the bravest students go to Gryffindor, the smartest to Ravenclaw, the most cunning to Slytherin and the rest to Hufflepuff. So that bears out the idea that the majority of students are Hufflepuffs.

There are non-English Death Eaters – the foreign professor in Goblet of Fire of one. Also, Voldemort spent time in Europe during his exile. The other European magic schools are said to be very secretive about their location, though. So the fact that there isn’t much interaction between witches of different nationalities doesn’t seem unrealistic.

Quiddich does seem kind of dumb rules-wise. But that’s true of most sports so far as I’m concerned.

One thing I do wonder – are there witches in America? in Asia? Middle Eastern witches (who fly using carpets instead of brooms) are mentioned in the first book, but I don’t recall any American or Asian witches being mentioned.

Anyway, these are school books to a large degree and school books tend to be rather narrow in scope – they’re about the school and what goes on in the school. The younger the students, the more narrow the scope. However, in the last two books (as Harry and crew get older), the focus has widened. I expect we’ll get an even better look at the “whole world” of wizardry in the final two books.

12

American witches are mentioned living in Salem.

13

I don’t like Quiddich either because the rules don’t see to make any real sense.

Marc

14

Jess, Dean Thomas is an American. We may presume Cho Chung is Chinese, at least ethnically, and the Patil twins are South Asian, at least ethnically. So I think we can assume the wizarding world is global.

Something that continues to annoy me about Order of the Phoenix is the battle in the Ministry at the end, specifically when Neville and Harry paralyzed two of the Death Eaters and then left the room…without taking their wands!

Later on, after those same two Death Eaters (I forget which two) had been revived by their friends, they were able to rejoin the fight, which they couldn’t have if Neville and Harry had just taken their freaking wands.

Neville’s own wand had been broken by that point in the story, so there were even two reasons why that would’ve been a good idea. But it seems not to have even occured to J.K. or the boys.

15

Yep, it’s at the beginning of GoF, when H, R, & H are going to get water. There were apparently some American witches with a banner for “The Salem Witches Institute”.

16

What? No he isn’t! What gave you that idea?

17

50 points to Short Guy’s house for the tennis quip.

Jess - I believe we meant to think there are wizards and witches everywhere. The, er, ‘companions’ (is that what you’d call them?) to the HP series, ie ‘Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them’ & ‘Quidditch Through The Ages’ - also penned by Rowling, descrbe Magical Folk, Magical Creatures & Quidditch teams from all over the world.

18

Since when is Dead Thomas American?

19

Since when is Dean Thomas American?

lol, dead Thomas. I’m officially an idiot. The ‘d’ key isn’t even near the ‘n’ key!

20

What really bugs me about the size of Hogwarts is that it makes no sense from a teaching perspective. We know there are four houses and seven years, and we never see students from more than two houses at most having classes together. Furthermore, until the latest round of problems with Divination, there seems to have been only one teacher for each subject. That means many of the teachers have at least fourteen separate classes to prep for, and if there really are a thousand students, the grading would be flat-out impossible! Do they all have their own personal time-turners?

OK, we know some of them have a few shortcuts up their sleeves (Professor Binns apparently grades by the inch, and he probably doesn’t need to eat or sleep either), but I can’t see a dedicated teacher like McGonagall or Lupin putting up with such a schedule, or a decent headmaster making them do so.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the books, and one of the things I love most about them is that they’re as much about the art of teaching as the craft of magic, but this strikes me as a glaring oversight on JKR’s part (especially when she gets so much else about teaching right :slight_smile: ).