I just rewatched the Harry Potter films and kind of have a question. The film clearly portrays that there is the “Wizarding World” overlaid on top of our conventional “Muggle” world. Wizard-folk still live in our world in our towns and cities, but also have their own towns, cities, infrastructure, etc that is both separate and intermingled with ours, but hidden. The Wizarding population is a global minority, but not insignificant, as evident when they gather by the tens of thousands for their quidditch tournaments.
But the conceit appears to be that we dumb muggles have no idea that wizards, witches, and their various fantastic creatures actually exist.
So my main question is what happened after Voldermort’s forces started opening attacking the Muggle world (starting with collapsing London’s Millennial Bridge in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Did Muggles just assume that was just a freak natural phenomenon (in which case…what’s the point)? Did the British Armed Forces (and presumably their NATO allies) mobilize against this new strange threat, much in the same way they would against an alien or other supernatural invasion?
How “hidden” is the Wizarding world really? There are clearly enough “half-bloods” and “Muggle-born” wizards/witches that it’s considered a “thing”. That seems like a lot Darrin Stephens out there keeping that shit a secret. And not all of them are sympathetic (Like the Dursleys). They exist in physical locations, not some unreachable parallel dimension as I understand it. They are just well hidden through charms, invisibility spells, force shields and whatnot.
Also, what did these wizard folk do for work? I assume most of them didn’t work in the wizarding economy. What does one do with a diploma from “Hogwarts”, a school that for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist in the Muggle world? Some families like the Malfoys are show to be extremely wealthy. What did they make their money in? I imagine one could be very successful on Wall Street or law or any number of other professions subtly applying magic. Then again, couldn’t pretty much any wizard become wealthy if they wanted?
Or is it basically just like Men in Black where there is always a big enough spell to make the dumb muggles forget or ignore that a dragon just blew up Big Ben?
If you start to look too close, the fact that it wasn’t too well thought out really shows.
My main question really goes the other way - why DO the wizards keep hidden? In many ways, they are superior to muggles. Why don’t they just “come out” and take over? So many of them hate us anyway, they must surely chafe under the requirement to stay hidden.
The government knows about the Wizarding world, so they must have come to come mutual understanding. But why? Wouldn’t having the ability to spy unseen be very useful in international relations?
Of course, wouldn’t having a cell phone be a lot easier than using owls for long distance communication?
I imagine that most of them have jobs that aren’t inherently magical, doing much the same sorts of things that muggles do: There are wizard farmers, and wizard grocers who retail their produce, and wizard salesmen of household products, and entertainers and janitors and piano-tuners and so on. And folks on both sides of the divide could do business with each other: A cabbage is a cabbage, whether grown by a wizard or a muggle. But for cultural reasons, they mostly don’t: Wizards mostly do business with other wizards.
There may certainly be wizard farmers, wizard grocers, and so on. But the Harry Potter theme is that they are magical farmers and grocers and so on. Pianos are tuned and floors are cleaned using magic. For the most part, wizards do not know much of anything about or seem to really care about, or interact with, the “Muggle” world, and, when it comes to work, they have their own parallel economy involving piles of gold coins and gnomish bankers.
Coming out and taking over is exactly what He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his followers want to do. I believe when magic is exposed to Muggles, people from the Ministry cloud memories of the Muggles so they don’t remember the magic.
In the first book food was made magically. But later books established that magic could not be used to make food and retconned the food being made the normal way and merely teleported magically to the table.
In the last or next-to-last book it was made apparent that the muggle world was aware that some seriously bad shit was breaking loose. The head of the Ministry of Magic sat down with the Prime Minister, who, almost uniquely, knew about the wizards, and giave him a heads-up, and I think he had to do PR / damage control with the general populace. It’s been awhile since it read it so there may be distortions in this descrip.
There’s a lot that doesn’t really make sense about the relationship between the wizarding and mundane worlds. As a very simple example, the wizards have a well known spell to open locks. They also have locks. Why would they have locks if every member of their society can open them? And if they don’t have locks, why would they have spells to open locks? Also, think for a moment about the idea of “magical” plants and animals. Dragons, unicorns, and then those crazy herbology plants. If they exist, and just wander around (and grow) out in the wild, how did the muggle world not find them millenia ago? And what distinguishes a “magical” plant or animal from a normal one, anyhow? If muggles had never found the platypus, and if platypus venom (yes, they’re venomous) was a crucial ingredient to some potion, would they be thought of as “magical” by the wizarding world? Or maybe they ARE and SHOULD be but it was a mistake of containment that allowed muggles to find them at all? Etc. Etc. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
(Any time a discussion like this comes up, I have to recommend that people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is technically “fan fiction” but which stretches the general idea of what fan fic is far, far beyond the breaking point.)
(Also, figured I’d put in a plug for my theory as to how the book series was going to end, back before book 7 came out. So, we know that (a) Harry and co will be travelling around destroying horcruxes to make Voldy mortal, and (b) there is some contact between the wizarding world and the muggle world, and (c) Voldy and the Slytherins are incredibly contemptuous of muggles. So, the way I would have bet good money the final confrontation would go was:
(1) Big battle is ensuing
(2) Harry and friends manage to destroy final Horcrux
(3) Leaving Harry and Voldy alone on the field
(4) “Sure, you destroyed my Horcruxes, but what chance do you think you have against me, I am the greatest wizard ever”, Voldy taunts
(5) And then his skull explodes because he got sniped by an SAS sniper from 1200 yard away
(6) And then the muggles and wizards are friends, and “muggleborne” is no longer a pejorative, and we see the first glimpse of a new world where they can all learn from each other yada yada yada )
Like I said - why don’t they? If all the wizards banded together, they could take over the world. And why wouldn’t they? Living the marginalized life they are forced to. Hiding in the shadows. Muggles living in fear of them (if they knew). Muggles would burn them at the stake at the first chance. They could live their lives in the open, unafraid.
Of course, that describes the X-Men franchise, too.
This is pretty much the entire problem I have with anything involving magic and this world: Harry Potter, Avengers, Good Omens, Lucifer, Doctor Who, all of that. I just can’t bring myself to care what happens next. Nothing is ever permanent because – magic.
Lord of the Rings is different because it is in a different world with different rules. Men in Black has the flasher thingy, which at least shows that they paid some attention to the suspension of disbelief problem.
Yeah, in the scene where the minister of magic is telling the prime minister “yeah, all those accidents weren’t really accidents - we covered up what really happened, which was an attack by magical terrorists” - the PM’s reaction is quite unrealistic and always disappointed me. In the book he just kinda gives up because he’s so fed up with dealing with magic, whereas in real life you’d think he would figure out a way to use the vast resources available to him to handle the situation.
That’s not what the wizards want, because they seem to know that if their existence gets our, they will be utterly destroyed by the muggles despite their magic. Which means that at the end of the day, a bunch of muggles with guns > wizards. Which means that the Ministry of Magic is selfishly allowing muggles to die to a magical terrorist they cannot control just so they don’t have to give up power.
Voldemort seems to have a different assessment of the capability of wizards vs muggles. He wants to go public and conquer the muggle world. But that seems pretty ridiculous. He’s got what, 60 followers? A couple hundred if we count not just the Death Eaters but their families as well (since families like Malfoy or Goyle seem pretty dedicated to Voldemort as a whole).
Their only advantage is the fact that muggles know nothing about them. As soon as Voldemort revealed himself, he’d lose that advantage. And meanwhile, the wizards - ESPECIALLY the anti-muggle pure-blood-obsessed Nazi wizards - are WILLFULLY IGNORANT of the muggle world. Wizards other than Arthur look down on studying the muggle world, or how their tools work. Hell, based on the education Harry got from age 11 on, they don’t understand basic statistics. Their grasp on science is positively Aristotelian. And the few wizards like Arthur, or the muggle-borns like Harry and Hermione - the kind of wizards who would be a wannabe-magical-conqueror’s greatest asset in controlling the Muggle world - are dismissed off hand.
In short, Voldemort is a shit conqueror, and if the wizards weren’t as incompetent as they are, he wouldn’t have gotten even as far as he did; even without Harry Potter, the idea that he’d ever fulfill his goals is ridiculous.
The Wizarding World seems like a very badly run place. Everyone keeps lots secrets that seem like stuff everyone should know. Hogwarts is described as “one of the safest places in the wizarding world” yet the faculty appears to have only a superficial concern for student safety, and they have highly questionably hiring practices to say the least. Their government is quite authoritarian and fascist. It doesn’t seem like a place anyone would ever want to live, particularly anyone who has grown up in a “free” Muggle world place like the UK.
That Rowling is a poor writer (or at least a poor world builder) became more and more obvious as the series went on, the scope enlarged, and the books got longer. There’s a lot of wacky for the sake of wacky and “this works this way and this other thing doesn’t” that’s okay when it’s mostly a magical boarding school and not when it’s supporting a larger world. For example, quidditch was obviously created by someone who doesn’t like or understand sports. But that’s not much of an example. More relevant is like the monetary system. Obviously meant to be a play on the pre-decimal British system, it ignores the fact that while it was more complicated there was an obvious underlying logic based on a mixed system of 12 and 20. More complicated than a decimal system? Sure. But except for the proliferation of weird names and coin values, not that much more complicated.
Similarly, there’s the example that electronics simply don’t work at Hogwarts. The excuse is that somehow too much magic interferes. Again, fine when it’s a magical boarding school. But when you start thinking about electronic design and types of electronics and what the implications are if magic can somehow interfere with physics, the world shows more cracks.
And of course there’s the whole interaction of the two worlds. Simply blocking everything, wiping everyone’s mind, and so on requires a level of competence that simply does not seem present. Similarly, the claim may be that without the masquerade “muggles would be asking us for help all the time”, except that the numbers are such that they are clearly vulnerable. Especially since without a wand most are basically useless when it comes to focusing or casting magic. And I suspect the laws could easily be used against them. After all, unless there’s an unpublished body of law that says, for instance, they are not subject to normal jurisdiction, why not go after someone like Malfoy for years of back taxes?
Tennis was obviously also created by someone who doesn’t understand sports, but here we are.
And what sorts of taxes do you imagine the Malfoys owe? It’s all inherited wealth, and inherited wealth in our world usually ends up paying almost no taxes.
Surely it isn’t ALL inherited. Malfoy has investments throughout the magical world that grow his wealth. Unless his ambition only extends to half baked world domination schemes…
