It’s been about a decade since I paid Muggle Quidditch any attention (brother played on the college club team and I watched some of his games), but they were actively inclusive in the rulebook in a way that I didn’t quite get at the time, but am impressed by in retrospect. Instead of mandating that games have a certain number of male and female players, they instead put a max on same gender identification in the game at a time. That was actively inclusive at a time when few were. (Of course the same rulebook also mandated jersey numbers be whole, arabic numerals between 0-99, with exceptions for pi, e, and 9 3/4 among others… Nerds, whatcha gonna do?)
I don’t know that the name change will help them get away from the lolHarryPotterSport thing they have now. It might have been created by people in cloaks and waving wands, but the players now have cleats, dri-fit, and receiver gloves. Maybe a name change will get people to realize that it started out strange, but it’s now a pretty interesting full contact mashup of other sports. However, I definitely understand why they would be interested in not being connected to JKR and her TERF-ery.
Muggle Quidditch has the snitch at 30 pts and ends the game. (Edit: looking at their website, it looks like they might be moving to a variation on the basketball Elam ending this year. Play a regulation time chunk. Set target score of (winning team + 70). First team to that target score wins, snitch doesn’t end play (but now worth 35 because ties suck)
I mean, there are probably hundreds of real sports, so being able to find one that has at least one dumber rule than Quidditch isn’t really a good defense of it.
I think it’s significantly that the scoring is broken, but the fact that catching the snitch is basically an entirely separate game is also dumb.
Sure, theoretically they interact, but that’s not how it’s portrayed at all, they needed a way to make a loser like Harry get to be the hero despite sucking at everything. It’s be like if the NFL had a designated chess player and the winner of that match got an extra 45 points added to their football team’s score.
Nothing that new, or even “lowbrow,” about “Muddle Quidditch”; back in 2017, I remember seeing flyers for tryouts for teams at Oxford University. However, I am in the “if you have to walk your brooms around instead of flying on them, then don’t call it quidditch” camp.
Then again, you’d have to realize that those very same people have decided that you are so far below them that they don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.
Rowling seemed to feel the same way. After the World Cup in Book 4, it seemed like Quidditch pretty much dropped out of sight. Which may have been a deliberate decision to symbolize the end of the relatively innocent and childlike part of the story, but may also have been JKR realizing that it was getting a bit tedious.
So in real life Quidditch, how do they handle the bludgers? IIRC, they were 2 semi-sentient balls that just flew around the place trying to smack everyone off their broomsticks. There were even a few position players whose only purpose was to defend against them.
What’s broken about the scoring system? The fact that it’s all multiples of 10? Much less silly than, say, a scoring system that goes love-fifteen-thirty-forty-game. The fact that there are multiple ways to score? American football has touchdowns, field goals, and safeties, plus two different ways to add on to a touchdown. The fact that the Snitch is worth so little, compared to the typical Quaffle scores? Again, I point you to American football, where field goals are a small portion of the total score, and safeties even smaller.
And yes, I did say “the fact that the Snitch is worth so little”, because that’s the way it’s actually described in the books. In rare cases where the Snitch is caught extremely quickly, it can be enough points to decide the game. But it’s far more typical for a game to go so long that the Snitch points are completely irrelevant.
The bludger is a slightly deflated dodgeball that can only be manipulated by beaters.
In the books, a beater’s job is to defend against a bludger. In the real world game, the beaters are the only players allowed to pick up and toss the bludgers at other players, temporarily knocking them out of the game like in dodgeball (they also have to drop whatever ball they’re carrying if they have one). They basically have the opposite role of the fictional players.
I get the feeling that watching people play this would be like watching Calvinball.
In the books, the scoring system is disastrous, a completely ridiculous farce. The real world version fixed it, because the book system was so bad that nobody would attempt to use it in a real game.
The non-fictional game itself is not half bad. It combines multiple elements and has confusing seeming gameplay with multiple balls in play at once, but it has a cohesive rule set that could competitively interesting. It’s biggest potential downside is that multiple things are happening at once.
The whole thing with the brooms is what takes it to new levels of silliness. Like playing Polo or running the Kentucky Derby with hobby horses instead of real horses.
Yes, because most of the games we see in the books are the rare cases where it’s caught quickly. But we’re also told that it’s not uncommon for a match to literally last days. Just think of how many hundreds or thousands of quaffle points you’d get in a game that long.
Boy, wait until they find out about the social justice positions of the people who invented basketball, baseball, hockey, football, soccer, cricket, tennis, golf, curling, luge, figure skating, volleyball, squash, parallel bars, rugby, hurling, and basically every other sport on earth.
Okay, but then it’s bad writing to say that most quidditch games last for days, but all the games that Harry plays in turn out to be rare exceptions to that rule.
yeah, this.
A similar thing is happening with the creator of Father Ted due to his similar views.
(someone’s making a musical of it, and they want to remove his name from it)
It’s fiction, there’s nothing common or rare, it’s all just what the author wants to say. She could just as easily claim that there are matches that have lasted decades, with children taking over for their parents when they get too old to play. (Legend has it that the snitch flew away to another continent, but the players must press on!)
