A magic cloak that can hide from Death can probably hide from Accio, too.

Magic is that hard, but being a genius doesn’t make you good at it. Rote memorisation makes you good at it. Hermione isn’t a genius, she enjoys rote learning. Harry and Ron crave stimulation, and there’s none to be found in Rowling’s magic system. Rowling might have intended magic to be easy, but she made a mistake. Rowling enjoys rote memorisation, so it’s easy for her and her self insert, but not for normal people who want to be intellectually stimulated. Rowling accidentally made magic hard, and the story makes more sense with her mistake in it.

That’s the backstory of Gloryhammer

And if you watch too much TV, you’ll get square eyes!

Yes.

Harry Potter’s magic system isn’t simple.

Rincewind isn’t useless at most things, he’s only useless at magic.

Esk is actually able to use magic to solve problems, because she’s a precocious child and also female.

Well, the needs of a fiction reader and the needs of a character in the world are different. Harry actually needed to learn magic. And there’s no logic to it, so all he could do was rote memorisation. He would have been happier with a magic system that makes sense.

Hermione is supposed to be a genius nerd, and yet she does far less in 7 books to actually study her magic system, than Vin has done by the start of the second book. Vin isn’t a nerd or a genius, she’s just a capable hero living in a world where magic makes sense, so she’s better at studying than Hermione. Hermione gets 8 hours to do it a day for 6 years and still can’t compete with Vin.

It also corrupts Isildur, makes Bilbo grumpy, gives us insight into Galadriel, creates tension between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, gives Gollum multiple personalities, starts an argument at Rivendell, makes Gandalf fuck off for a decade, gives us insight into the strengths of hobbits, weakens Frodo, drives the epilogue, creates the ringwraiths, and contextualises the stagnancy of the elves.

Looking evil isn’t a limitation, it’s flavour text. It doesn’t affect the story, it just gives us vibes. If there’s one thing Rowling is good at, it’s writing flavour text to convey vibes. But there’s no plot in that limitation. Horcruxes break Sanderson’s second law, and that’s why they’re not as interesting as the One Ring. The One Ring puts challenges in front of every character who interacts with it: Sauron, Isildur, Elrond, Bilbo, Gandalf, Frodo, Gollum, Galadriel, even Samwise. It promises all of them something they want, and takes a price from every one, changing the course of the story many times. Samwise is the least affected, but it still takes away something he loves; his best friend.

Horcruxes do four things: they kill Dumbledore, give Harry a quest, make Ron grumpy, and ex machina the deus. Bringing Voldy back and manifesting Riddle don’t count because those are retcons, and we’re talking about writing processes.

Two of those things they do are just because they’re a macguffin. Literally anything the characters want could have been substituted. Ron grumpy is, again, flavour text. The Deus ex Machina is the one interesting thing they do to change the story.

We do, at the very least, know why Gandalf’s magic works. The universe was sung into being, and Gandalf is a divine being who can participate in that song. We know where his magic comes from. We know it’s divine in origin.

We don’t know where Harry’s magic comes from. Were wizard blessed by a god? Is it a magic gene? Is it fueled by intelligence, or imagination? There are no answers.

Take horcruxes vs the one ring. One is clearly a second rate copy of the other. But the one ring has a clear limitation for Sauron: It holds most of his power, and if it’s destroyed, he can be defeated. What limitation do horcruxes have for Voldemort? He has to split his soul into parts. What does that mean practically? Nothing. It’s not a limitation, it’s just a reason the good guys don’t use it. From the council of Elrond, we know the rules of the one ring, and we know how to use them to solve a problem. Sanderson’s first law. Its limitation for Sauron is more interesting than its power for Sauron. Its limitation for the Fellowship is more interesting than its power for the Fellowship. Sanderson’s second law.

I think Star Wars’ magic system has rules. They’re philosophical rules.

If you’re paying attention to The Force Awakens, you notice that Rey is losing to Kylo, up until she gets angry at him. And then her stance changes, and she starts attacking way faster. Rey used the dark side. You only notice that happening if you understand the rules of the Force. And if you do, in the next movie, you’re rewarded. Luke is teaching Rey, and she goes straight to the dark. Rey is a natural dark side user, way moreso than Anakin and Luke. If you knew the magic system, you saw that coming. Now, what this subplot culminates in is Rey Palpatine, which is bad writing. But that’s not the magic system’s fault. The magic system did its job perfectly. It’s possible to understand how magic works in Star Wars, and that gives you insight into what will happen next. That’s basically a tweak on Sanderson’s first law. Episodes 8 and 9 also expand on the whole dyad thingy instead of adding something new, just like Sanderson says. And The Last Jedi introduces a limitation (You can’t force project this far, the effort would kill you), and then uses it later in the same movie with Luke. The underlying principles of Sanderson’s laws are there. The magic has rules and the rules inform the story.

Yeah, book 3 is the one where Rowling made an effort to delve into the workings of the magic system. The Patronus is the only spell we actually learn how to cast. (No, levio-sah doesn’t count). The time turner has limitations which allow Rowling to tell an interesting story with it.

Rowling made magic interesting for one book, and Harry became interested in magic.

Then she changed her mind.

No, I like soft magic systems when they’re good. Take Star Wars. It’s so soft. It’s so soft that when GL introduced midichlorians to try and make it hard, everyone hated it.

The Force is good because it represents a certain philosophy. It’s basically the Tao. Everything the Force can do is thematically appropriate and serves to teach us the philosophies of the Jedi, the Sith, and the other force users. The light side is harmony and believing in yourself. The dark side is domination and corruption. All the force powers support these themes and illustrate the force users embodying their philosophical beliefs in the world. Obi-Wan uses mind tricks because he believes in nonviolent misdirection. Palpatine uses lightning because he believes in ultimate power.

Rowling’s magic system means… Magic. It’s there to convince us that this fantasy world is magic. The Force can break Sanderson’s laws because it means something more than just magic. It’s philosophically consistent, and that’s more important than being internally consistent. Rowling’s magic only relates to Rowling’s magic, so it needs to be internally consistent to work. And it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

You know what? Rowling did actually follow Sanderson’s laws with one specific bit of magic. The time turner. The time turner has a very simple limitation: you cannot change the past. But, you can do things in the past that don’t change what you experienced the first time. We understand how the time turner works, and Rowling comes up with a clever way to make it work, which makes sense to us. That’s the second and first law! The time turner is well written!

And then she broke the third rule. She didn’t expand on it, she added something new in book 4 instead. So people asked “what about the time turner”, and in the next book she got mad and destroyed them all so she’d never be asked “what about the time turner” again.

Rowling wrote something really interesting that actually makes sense. And then decided she didn’t want it in her story anymore. Because Rowling doesn’t actually like writing interesting magic. And that’s why Harry and Ron aren’t very interested in magic. Rowling was never able to write a scene where a character actually geeks out about how magic works, because she doesn’t care how it works. She’s not interested.

In Sanderson’s super school book, there are 10 kids and only one of them is uninterested in piloting spacefighters. But he is interested in engineering, so he’s still able to be a big nerd about the book’s subject matter. Everyone else is either a great pilot who likes piloting, or fucking dies in a tragic scheme emphasising the brutality and pointlessness of war.

Sanderson doesn’t write characters who just drift along without an interest in anything, because Sanderson writes books about topics that he makes interesting.

Rowling is only able to create characters who think Divination or History of Magic are boring, because she makes them boring. Sometimes on purpose!

• No limits on how often you can cast spells
• No explanation of how magic actually works
• No explanation of how magic objects are created
• No explanation of how spells are invented
• No explanation of how different species’ magic differs
• All the spell names are silly words in English and poorly understood Latin
• Never explained why incantations or gestures are needed
• Never explained what makes spells other than Patronus hard or easy
• Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than “they learned a lot of spells”
• Few/no limitations on spells, or limitations aren’t explained
• No contextually dependent spells
• It’s impossible to predict what will happen in the books based on understanding the magic system
• There are just. no. rules.

Brandon Sanderson is the best magic system writer in the world, and these are his “laws of magic” for creating an interesting magic system:

The First Law

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

The Second Law

Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this: Limitations > Powers
(Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way: Ω > | though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)

The Third Law

The third law is as follows: Expand what you already have before you add something new.

Rowling never follows these principles. The reader doesn’t understand the magic, magic is rarely given sensical limitations we understand, and Rowling always adds new stuff instead of explaining what we already have.

I posit that the answers to all these questions I listed just don’t exist. There is no explanation. Hermione does well in school because she rote memorises. Harry and Ron can’t engage with the material in their homework because they don’t understand it because nobody does.

What Harry Potter’s magic system, insofar as it exists, does do well, is vibes. It feels like a wondrous magic system. That’s what sold books. Harry likes all the vibes stuff in the books, like the spooky castle, fighting evil, being a strong wizard. He doesn’t understand any of the magical theory, because it doesn’t exist.

Does that mean I actually only need one tablet a week or a month? My doctor said I should have one every day.

So now Elon Musk is gonna help Ender Wiggin commit genocide?

Eat the rich!