If you think it’s odd enough in the books, you should see the real world people who play these games. I believe there are colleges that have Intramural/recreational quiddich games, some even travel to other schools to play!
I only know this because I found out that my own college’s intramural Quiddich team was banned by the school for being too violent and rowdy when playing their matches vs. other schools.
Personally, I always thought that catching the snitch should subtract points from whichever team was ahead-it would force the leading team to try and build enough of a lead to intentionally end the game, while giving the losing team motivation to chase the thing.
And both values are meaninglessly multiples of 10.
Other points:
I was always bugged by the scene (in a movie) where Harry and I think Draco leave the field and are flying around in the supporting structure of the stands. This is permissible? Then what’s the point of having lateral bounds to the field at all? Maybe the Snitch had been tampered with there, I don’t recall, but in that case why wasn’t the game halted, or a referee call made, or something?
At another time (in a book), it’s mentioned that Harry is risking (but then avoids) leading Gryffindor to their only last-place (among just four Houses) finish in two centuries of annual tournaments–a circumstance so staggeringly unlikely in any normal competitive environment that it cries out for some explanation. Of course there is none.
In a nutshell. (Though to be fair, some sports fans themselves don’t understand the games they watch much better…)
Yet there is a cool game concept there, and it helps further the theme that the wizarding world is a full-scale parallel to the muggle world.
They didn’t lose, it had something to do with point standings, they had to win with a certain amount of points ahead of the other team to advance in the standings or something, I think it had something to do with getting into the championship game. They needed a 40-50 point (I think) lead before he caught the snitch in order to improve their standing but Harry (for whatever reason) rushed the match when they didn’t have the buffer they needed.
I suspect Rowling threw the game together, and was then astonished that not only was the book popular and they wanted more, but now she had to back up the damn rules she didn’t think need a lot of thinking about.
I think Quidditch bugs me more than any other element of the HP books, for the reasons listed above. It’s a bad game, susceptible to manipulation and with big rules loopholes.
Plus, the idea that you’d have a game where people can be badly injured or even killed being played regularly is just stupid; there are not a lot of wizards in the world and the last thing most reasonable people want is for their children to be killed because they got hit in the head by a bludger and fell off their broom.
Plus, “quidditch,” “quaffle” and “bludger” are horrendously stupid-sounding made-up words.
What a horrible position the snitch chaser is, if you think about it. All you do it chase around an annoyingly erratic, mechanical object and fight off one other person trying to do the same thing. It sounds excessively tedious and frantic at the same time, but ultimately extremely boring.
If you look at most sports closely they start to look a little silly. Cricket is especially bizarre, and I’m from a country where it’s the major summer sport.
Being “silly,” and fundamentally broken as a sport are two different things. Also, one need not look “closely” at Quidditch to see its myriad flaws.
Quidditch is soccer in the sky, where the time limit is based on something arbitrary but controllable. That’s about as much as you need to know.
I still think the idea that the mere presence of enough magic can screw with one of the fundamental forces is worse. I mean, all electronics are is applied electromagnetism. For that matter, chemistry as we understand it should be entirely disrupted (and I think it’s fair to say that everyone at Hogwarts should be dead.) Magnetism in all forms should be gone as well. We should also lose all mechanics except gravitation, and shouldn’t be able to see any light or notice any other EM radiation. And what about the electroweak interaction? Does special relativity break down in a place like Hogwarts?
Such an effect would be a major shock to our understanding of the basic principles of the universe. Are there no Muggle-born wizards with scientists for parents?
Quidditch is just a badly-designed game. Taking out all of science at a place like Hogwarts is something else entirely.
I heard about that as well!
Right here in this thread - post #9.
I took Rowling’s continuation of the game past the first book as evidence she had no integrity as a writer. Sorta, “What!? You’re going to dedicated another 15 pages to this nonsense? Who do you think buys into this being legitimate?”
That’s pretty trivial against the very concept of magic- that you can somehow get from you wanting something to happen to that something happening with no rationally explainable link between the two.
Right, it would be so much better if instead all scores were meaninglessly multiples of 15, except for 45 which gets rounded down to 40.
And there’s nothing odd about a competitor in a competition that’s taken very seriously throwing in the towel before it’s strictly necessary, either: Professional chess players concede all the time, and in fact it’s considered a serious breach of etiquette to force your opponent to play to the bitter end. The only problem I have with Krum’s catching of the Snitch was that Bulgaria wasn’t actually all that far behind, and did still have a realistic (albeit small) chance of coming back.
It makes as much sense as Fizzbin.
“mashie-niblick”, “googlies”, “flying camel”, “hat trick”
That’s comparing slang and lingo to the official names of the sport and equipment.
That isn’t really any more retarded than the way tennis is scored - 15, 30, 40… so that I’ll give her a pass on. Since it makes no difference if a goal is 10 or 1 and the Snitch is 150 or 15, that’s the sort of thing that could have a historical reason for being the way it is and would never have had any reason for being changed, just as tennis would not change if you simple made the score of a games 1-0, 2-0, 3-1 instead of 15-love, 30-love, 40-15, and so on.
[QUOTE=GuanoLad]
If you look at most sports closely they start to look a little silly. Cricket is especially bizarre, and I’m from a country where it’s the major summer sport.
[/QUOTE]
What about cricket is illogical, though? Yes, all sports are a bit silly, but almost every major sport I can think of has well-designed rules intended to maintain the logic, integrity, and competitive value of the game. When serious loopholes or competitive imbalances are found they’re generally written out of the sport.
A recent real life example was when famed self-promoter Tim Ferriss won China’s national kickboxing championship by exploiting a rule that a competitor who left the fighting area three times was disqualified, and there wasn’t any rule against just pushing a guy out, so Ferriss won the championship by eschewing punching and kicking altogether and simply pushing his opponents out of the (ring?) over and over. Since nobody had thought to fight that way, and therefore to come up with a counter to it, it worked… but you can be damn sure they changed the rules right after that tournament.
43-Man Squamish, on the other hand…