To start with.… I’d recommend raising every character’s age by a few years. (I think this is a ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ idea, but I have no clue how prevalent either of these viewpoints are… How many people think that the first-years really act like eleven-year-olds? And I’m not just talking about Harry...)
And, consequently, Hogwarts now has only four years.
Also, I’m clueless about the math, but… I seem to remember reading in a discussion thread that 1000 students in Hogwarts implies a total wizarding population the size of a small town. So I’d cram in 4000 students into the 4 years of Hogwarts. (We’re gonna need TAs now, but that doesn’t change anything fundamental.) Unless… The population is still too small, in which case… I suppose you could keep the 1000 students and have other wizarding schools.
And I’d suggest compressing the first four chapters into one.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn’t get it right that quickly.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn’t get it right that quickly.
I think the point of that was partial transfiguration was a low hanging fruit that could be done fairly easily, but only if you had the right mindset. Other than having to hold timelessness in his head, it’s not any harder than regular transfiguration.
I think the point of that was partial transfiguration was a low hanging fruit that could be done fairly easily, but only if you had the right mindset. Other than having to hold timelessness in his head, it’s not any harder than regular transfiguration.
Come to think of it, you’re right.
I’d been approaching it from the “hero must struggle for several episodes to get awesome powers” angle, but Eliezer was obviously writing it to demonstrate the opposite.
(Although Harry being able to hold timelessness in his head with half an hour of trying is still Marty Stu-ish.)
He really should have been able to do it with billiard-ball atoms. Just define “the left half of the brick” as an object. It doesn’t make any sense that you can transfigure a bicycle but not the front wheel of that bicycle..
More than removing the first 3 years of Hogwarts, the tempo of MoR could be changed so that we don’t have all those events happening during Harry’s first year. There is time pressure regarding the fact that DADA teachers aren’t supposed to last more than one year, but something could have been done to circumvent that, and allow the events of the currently written MoR to span like 3 years of Hogwarts, with Harry being 13 or 14 when we reach the “Standfort Prison Experiment” part.
I do think that the first chapters are specially good with a young (11 yo) Harry, and that having him a teenager when he discovers about magic would ruin them. It would also make the whole Harry-Draco relationship completely different - their relationship in MoR is very interesting, but it wouldn’t have felt realistic for it to happen with a teenager Draco, while it is realistic with a still childish Draco.
From the Harry Potter Wiki: “Riddle used his wand at that time to place a curse on the job, causing its occupant to suffer some misfortune that would drive them from the job in a year or less. ”
We also know that canon!Lupin was just outed as a werewolf and resigned, and canon!Moody seemed fine when he got out of the Trunk. Quirrel isn’t doomed to die at the end, just to no longer be defense professor. Also, vs Ibyqrzbeg vf pbagebyyvat Dhveery, gura gur phefr zvtug abg nccyl gb uvz.
So basically, Quirrel could continue to exist, but not as Defense professor.
Claims of “No kids act like that!” where I’ve personally been or known kids who act exactly like that have made me very suspicious of the general pattern. Harry probably acts just like Eliezer did, or would have if he’d already known about Bayes.
Apparently the “you bite one math teacher” incident is an exaggeration of something in Eliezer’s own childhood. (At least I hope it was an exaggeration...)
That response has always annoyed me. If utter realism was a major component of what people wanted out of a story, they’d be stalking Facebook profiles instead. Or watching Pulp Fiction ad nauseam, or something.
IRL a person I’ve never heard of might survive being struck by lightning thrice and I’d say “meh”, but something like that better not happen in a story without a very good reason.
I’m puzzled by this response. If realism isn’t important, what’s the problem with having the Hogwarts kids acting more mature (or intelligent or whatever) than real kids that age typically do in the first place? It’s just a narrative trope that marks them as exceptional and therefore interesting.
ETA: Didn’t remember the bizarre conclusions that discussion reached, though. Is there any indication that Eliezer thought about the sociological angle before writing this? He might have made an honest mistake about the population.
Or the population might actually be much larger, Hogwarts might not be the only magical school, and the story just hasn’t gotten around to telling us yet.
It seems likely that Eliezer noticed this early and possible that he kept it in mind while writing and editing later chapters. I noticed after that discussion (though maybe this is just confirmation bias on my part?) subsequent chapters started having a bit more social background that systematically favored “moderately big Magical Britain” (closer to 70,000 than 3000) and more political detail that seemed to me “more realistic” for the suggested scale.
There were a lot of slightly recurring cameos by people who made fan art, for example, so that you get more of a sense that the writing works a bit like the Simpsons with a relatively gigantic cast and a more available whenever the plot requires. And then there was subtle but direct stuff like the digression into the daily lives of Auror’s guarding Azkaban with discussion of their alienation, working for triple pay (why official “triple pay”? why so formal? are their wizard labor unions?), and their silent culture of tolerated bribery. It smells to me like a small department within a much larger bureaucracy, or a platoon in an army, where people in the trenches together are reasonably OK pragmatically optimizing for mutual local benefit at the expense of the more sweeping institutions.
Isn’t a 70k population still too tiny to support the MoR-verse’s level of social complexity?
I don’t think so. I think 70K population is more than sufficient for what we observe. After all, the primary servant-class (House-Elves) isn’t included in that number. The primary banking/financial class and atleast some portion of the manufacturing class is goblins, which is also not included in that number. Anything that concerns the gathering of raw non-magical material (Farming/mining/etc) can be gotten by trading with (or thieving from) the muggles.
The rest: nobility, ministry employees, aurors, shopkeepers, athletes—I think they can fit in easily in a population of some dozens thousands. Possibly even less.
I always assumed, when reading the original books, that other British magical schools existed and Hogwarts just happened to be the best of them. The society as presented simply doesn’t make sense otherwise, even accounting for the fact that wizards seem to live significantly longer than Muggles and don’t seem to have many more kids.
It does take some handwaving (how would Hogwarts choose which magical children to send its acceptance letters to?), but not as much as fitting what looks like some pretty robust commerce and a rather heavyweight bureaucracy into a population of at most thirty thousand or so (less, if you extrapolate from class sizes).
not as much as fitting what looks like some pretty robust commerce and a rather heavyweight bureaucracy into a population of at most thirty thousand or so
I assumed that ~ 50% of wizarding adults were employed by the Ministry alone. Sounds just like the pointless bureaucracy you’d expect wizards to create.
Commerce, yes. That’s much more difficult to explain. Even more difficult to explain is the existence of specialised journals like Transfiguration Weekly. You’d need a European wizarding population of ~ a million at the very least. (And I’m probably underestimating.)
More importantly, how do you extrapolate from the class sizes? How are different age groups distributed in the population? (Not knowing the math sucks.)
ETA:
I always assumed, when reading the original books, that other British magical schools existed and Hogwarts just happened to be the best of them.
In Deathly Hallows, the Ministry made it mandatory for every wizarding child of school-going age to attend Hogwarts. IIRC, Lupin noted at the time that “Parents could always educate their children at home if they wished.” Didn’t say anything about other magical schools.
We probably shouldn’t leap to the assumption that Transfiguration Weekly is a peer-reviewed journal with a large staff publishing results from multiple large laboratories. For all we know it’s churned out in a basement by an amateur enthusiast, is only eight pages long on a good week and mostly consists of photographs of people’s cats transfigured into household objects.
In Deathly Hallows, the Ministry made it mandatory for every wizarding child of school-going age to attend Hogwarts.
I’d forgotten about that; but then again, I formed most of my opinions regarding Potter canon when I was a teenager reading books 3 and 4. I was an adult by the time I got to Deathly Hallows, and I didn’t read it too closely.
I suppose Goblet of Fire could be said to imply wizarding schools are fairly rare, though; it never mentions any continental schools besides Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. The movies seem to imply that those are all-male and all-female respectively, which might in turn suggest more schools offscreen, but I don’t think the books do.
I don’t think the books directly suggest that there are Durmstrang girls (although they never claim that it’s a unisex school), but Beauxbatons boys are mentioned, particularly in the context of the Yule Ball.
I could be wrong here, but I definitely remember someone, maybe Hagrid, claiming early on that Hogwarts was, “the best school in magical Britain.”
That implies others. It’s entirely possible that newer magical schools without a history of legendary wizards and a past alliance with two other prestigious schools would go largely unmentioned in the original Harry Potter.
Hogwarts was referred to on a number of occasions in canon as the “best” wizarding school in Britain.
As long as it doesn’t directly bear on the storyline though, I wouldn’t trust J. K. Rowling to keep careful track of everything she’s already written; I suspect she had different ideas at different times of whether Hogwarts was the only wizarding school in Britain.
I’m not sure about that, if anything she’s put on Pottermore is to be trusted, she’s written an extensive off-page history for her world.
The most interesting example is what she’s written about the Malfoy’s. Evidently, the family made most of their money in dealing with muggles prior to the ministry instituting the laws regarding secrecy. Once it became politically favorable to distance a prominent family from muggle ties, the Malfoy’s put on a strong pureblood facade that caught on after a few generations.
That sounds plausible, but not necessarily contradictory, since she may have come up with that history after writing things in earlier books which conflicted with it. She didn’t seem to have outlined all the books thoroughly in advance (if she did, she certainly failed to set up elements like the Deathly Hallows very well.)
In the original books, Harry’s cohort was born ten years into an extremely bloody civil war. I always assumed birth rates were extremely low for Harry’s age group, which would imply that the overall population is much larger than what you’d extrapolate from class sizes.
Of course, the numbers still don’t work. There are 40 kids in canon!Harry’s class. Even if you assume that’s a tenth of the normal birthrate and the average person lives to 150, you get a wizarding population of 6,000.
In MoR, class sizes are around 120 (more than half the kids are in the armies, and armies are 24 each), which is still problematic—with the generous assumptions above, you get a population of 18,000. But MoR does seem to hint there are other magical schools: Daphne at one point wonders if it’s worth going to the same school as Harry just to go to the same school as everybody important, which supports the theory that there are other magic schools, but that almost everyone influential went through Hogwarts.
In the original books, Harry’s cohort was born ten years into an extremely bloody civil war. I always assumed birth rates were extremely low for Harry’s age group, which would imply that the overall population is much larger than what you’d extrapolate from class sizes.
In that case, shouldn’t we see evidence of a baby boom occurring immediately following the end of the war, probably in the form of the years after Harry’s being noticeably bigger than those that came before? canon!Harry is rather unobservant, but you’d think he’d have noticed at least that.
For Harry to notice it would require Rowling to have thought of it. Plus, since it wasn’t really plot relevant it would be something of a violation of Conservation of Detail.
Daphne abandoned all pretense of aristocratic poise and let her head fall to the desk with a dull thud, as she wondered whether going to the same school as all the other important families was really worth going to the same school as the Chaos Legion.
Given that they canonically keep tabs on underage witches and wizards with magic, I suspect that they judge based on some combination of how magically promising the prospective student appears to be, what their social connections are (are they related to any highly placed individuals who graduated from Hogwarts?) and possibly some sort of affirmative action for muggle born students.
Actually the ministry has a trace spell, evidently, on the whole of magical Britain. Magical misdemeanors from underage wizards go largely unpoliced in all magical households, explaining the fact that several familys, such as the Malfoys and the Weasleys have sent children to Hogwarts who openly acknowledge having learnt spells outside of Hogwarts.
You may recall, once the ministry was in Voldemort’s pocket, the trace was used to track down underaged wizards not in Hogwarts.
I’d always supposed Hogwarts worked in conjunction, or possibly with special permissions, from the ministry to use the trace to send letters to children who had performed slight magical acts, such as Harry phasing his cousin through the glass at the snake exhibit.
To start with.… I’d recommend raising every character’s age by a few years. (I think this is a ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ idea, but I have no clue how prevalent either of these viewpoints are… How many people think that the first-years really act like eleven-year-olds? And I’m not just talking about Harry...)
And, consequently, Hogwarts now has only four years.
Also, I’m clueless about the math, but… I seem to remember reading in a discussion thread that 1000 students in Hogwarts implies a total wizarding population the size of a small town. So I’d cram in 4000 students into the 4 years of Hogwarts. (We’re gonna need TAs now, but that doesn’t change anything fundamental.) Unless… The population is still too small, in which case… I suppose you could keep the 1000 students and have other wizarding schools.
And I’d suggest compressing the first four chapters into one.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn’t get it right that quickly.
I think the point of that was partial transfiguration was a low hanging fruit that could be done fairly easily, but only if you had the right mindset. Other than having to hold timelessness in his head, it’s not any harder than regular transfiguration.
Come to think of it, you’re right.
I’d been approaching it from the “hero must struggle for several episodes to get awesome powers” angle, but Eliezer was obviously writing it to demonstrate the opposite.
(Although Harry being able to hold timelessness in his head with half an hour of trying is still Marty Stu-ish.)
No one else has ever tried it. It might not be that hard once you know what it is.
He really should have been able to do it with billiard-ball atoms. Just define “the left half of the brick” as an object. It doesn’t make any sense that you can transfigure a bicycle but not the front wheel of that bicycle..
Also, as someone on TV Tropes pointed out, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is set in 1991, but Julian Barbour’s book The End of Time was published in 1999 and his research paper directly addressing the subject was published in 1994.
More than removing the first 3 years of Hogwarts, the tempo of MoR could be changed so that we don’t have all those events happening during Harry’s first year. There is time pressure regarding the fact that DADA teachers aren’t supposed to last more than one year, but something could have been done to circumvent that, and allow the events of the currently written MoR to span like 3 years of Hogwarts, with Harry being 13 or 14 when we reach the “Standfort Prison Experiment” part.
I do think that the first chapters are specially good with a young (11 yo) Harry, and that having him a teenager when he discovers about magic would ruin them. It would also make the whole Harry-Draco relationship completely different - their relationship in MoR is very interesting, but it wouldn’t have felt realistic for it to happen with a teenager Draco, while it is realistic with a still childish Draco.
From the Harry Potter Wiki: “Riddle used his wand at that time to place a curse on the job, causing its occupant to suffer some misfortune that would drive them from the job in a year or less. ”
We also know that canon!Lupin was just outed as a werewolf and resigned, and canon!Moody seemed fine when he got out of the Trunk. Quirrel isn’t doomed to die at the end, just to no longer be defense professor. Also, vs Ibyqrzbeg vf pbagebyyvat Dhveery, gura gur phefr zvtug abg nccyl gb uvz.
So basically, Quirrel could continue to exist, but not as Defense professor.
The curse could just be removed as not plot-important.
I regret that I have only one upvote to give. Never thought of cutting the Gordian knot that way.
ETA: Although to be fair to myself, I never tried to think of ways to make Quirrel last for over a year.
Gung jbhyq or n qrnq tvir-njnl, gubhtu. Naq Qhzoyrqber jbhyqa’g whfg qb abguvat sbe gjb lrnef vs ur fhfcrpgrq Ibyqrzbeg jnf grnpuvat ng uvf fpubby.
Hayrff Uneel naq Dhveery fgntr gung onggyr jvgu Ibyqrzbeg. V vzntvar Dhveery unf engure qvssrerag cynaf sbe gung, gubhtu.
Claims of “No kids act like that!” where I’ve personally been or known kids who act exactly like that have made me very suspicious of the general pattern. Harry probably acts just like Eliezer did, or would have if he’d already known about Bayes.
Apparently the “you bite one math teacher” incident is an exaggeration of something in Eliezer’s own childhood. (At least I hope it was an exaggeration...)
That response has always annoyed me. If utter realism was a major component of what people wanted out of a story, they’d be stalking Facebook profiles instead. Or watching Pulp Fiction ad nauseam, or something.
IRL a person I’ve never heard of might survive being struck by lightning thrice and I’d say “meh”, but something like that better not happen in a story without a very good reason.
I’m puzzled by this response. If realism isn’t important, what’s the problem with having the Hogwarts kids acting more mature (or intelligent or whatever) than real kids that age typically do in the first place? It’s just a narrative trope that marks them as exceptional and therefore interesting.
This discussion? :-)
Yeah, that’s the one.
ETA: Didn’t remember the bizarre conclusions that discussion reached, though. Is there any indication that Eliezer thought about the sociological angle before writing this? He might have made an honest mistake about the population.
Or the population might actually be much larger, Hogwarts might not be the only magical school, and the story just hasn’t gotten around to telling us yet.
It seems likely that Eliezer noticed this early and possible that he kept it in mind while writing and editing later chapters. I noticed after that discussion (though maybe this is just confirmation bias on my part?) subsequent chapters started having a bit more social background that systematically favored “moderately big Magical Britain” (closer to 70,000 than 3000) and more political detail that seemed to me “more realistic” for the suggested scale.
There were a lot of slightly recurring cameos by people who made fan art, for example, so that you get more of a sense that the writing works a bit like the Simpsons with a relatively gigantic cast and a more available whenever the plot requires. And then there was subtle but direct stuff like the digression into the daily lives of Auror’s guarding Azkaban with discussion of their alienation, working for triple pay (why official “triple pay”? why so formal? are their wizard labor unions?), and their silent culture of tolerated bribery. It smells to me like a small department within a much larger bureaucracy, or a platoon in an army, where people in the trenches together are reasonably OK pragmatically optimizing for mutual local benefit at the expense of the more sweeping institutions.
Also, apparently there are other schools in MoR!Britain.
Isn’t a 70k population still too tiny to support the MoR-verse’s level of social complexity?
I don’t think so. I think 70K population is more than sufficient for what we observe. After all, the primary servant-class (House-Elves) isn’t included in that number. The primary banking/financial class and atleast some portion of the manufacturing class is goblins, which is also not included in that number. Anything that concerns the gathering of raw non-magical material (Farming/mining/etc) can be gotten by trading with (or thieving from) the muggles.
The rest: nobility, ministry employees, aurors, shopkeepers, athletes—I think they can fit in easily in a population of some dozens thousands. Possibly even less.
I always assumed, when reading the original books, that other British magical schools existed and Hogwarts just happened to be the best of them. The society as presented simply doesn’t make sense otherwise, even accounting for the fact that wizards seem to live significantly longer than Muggles and don’t seem to have many more kids.
It does take some handwaving (how would Hogwarts choose which magical children to send its acceptance letters to?), but not as much as fitting what looks like some pretty robust commerce and a rather heavyweight bureaucracy into a population of at most thirty thousand or so (less, if you extrapolate from class sizes).
I assumed that ~ 50% of wizarding adults were employed by the Ministry alone. Sounds just like the pointless bureaucracy you’d expect wizards to create.
Commerce, yes. That’s much more difficult to explain. Even more difficult to explain is the existence of specialised journals like Transfiguration Weekly. You’d need a European wizarding population of ~ a million at the very least. (And I’m probably underestimating.)
More importantly, how do you extrapolate from the class sizes? How are different age groups distributed in the population? (Not knowing the math sucks.)
ETA:
In Deathly Hallows, the Ministry made it mandatory for every wizarding child of school-going age to attend Hogwarts. IIRC, Lupin noted at the time that “Parents could always educate their children at home if they wished.” Didn’t say anything about other magical schools.
We probably shouldn’t leap to the assumption that Transfiguration Weekly is a peer-reviewed journal with a large staff publishing results from multiple large laboratories. For all we know it’s churned out in a basement by an amateur enthusiast, is only eight pages long on a good week and mostly consists of photographs of people’s cats transfigured into household objects.
I’d forgotten about that; but then again, I formed most of my opinions regarding Potter canon when I was a teenager reading books 3 and 4. I was an adult by the time I got to Deathly Hallows, and I didn’t read it too closely.
I suppose Goblet of Fire could be said to imply wizarding schools are fairly rare, though; it never mentions any continental schools besides Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. The movies seem to imply that those are all-male and all-female respectively, which might in turn suggest more schools offscreen, but I don’t think the books do.
I don’t think the books directly suggest that there are Durmstrang girls (although they never claim that it’s a unisex school), but Beauxbatons boys are mentioned, particularly in the context of the Yule Ball.
According to this, Durmstrang has girls as well.
I could be wrong here, but I definitely remember someone, maybe Hagrid, claiming early on that Hogwarts was, “the best school in magical Britain.” That implies others. It’s entirely possible that newer magical schools without a history of legendary wizards and a past alliance with two other prestigious schools would go largely unmentioned in the original Harry Potter.
Hogwarts was referred to on a number of occasions in canon as the “best” wizarding school in Britain.
As long as it doesn’t directly bear on the storyline though, I wouldn’t trust J. K. Rowling to keep careful track of everything she’s already written; I suspect she had different ideas at different times of whether Hogwarts was the only wizarding school in Britain.
I’m not sure about that, if anything she’s put on Pottermore is to be trusted, she’s written an extensive off-page history for her world. The most interesting example is what she’s written about the Malfoy’s. Evidently, the family made most of their money in dealing with muggles prior to the ministry instituting the laws regarding secrecy. Once it became politically favorable to distance a prominent family from muggle ties, the Malfoy’s put on a strong pureblood facade that caught on after a few generations.
That sounds plausible, but not necessarily contradictory, since she may have come up with that history after writing things in earlier books which conflicted with it. She didn’t seem to have outlined all the books thoroughly in advance (if she did, she certainly failed to set up elements like the Deathly Hallows very well.)
In the original books, Harry’s cohort was born ten years into an extremely bloody civil war. I always assumed birth rates were extremely low for Harry’s age group, which would imply that the overall population is much larger than what you’d extrapolate from class sizes.
Of course, the numbers still don’t work. There are 40 kids in canon!Harry’s class. Even if you assume that’s a tenth of the normal birthrate and the average person lives to 150, you get a wizarding population of 6,000.
In MoR, class sizes are around 120 (more than half the kids are in the armies, and armies are 24 each), which is still problematic—with the generous assumptions above, you get a population of 18,000. But MoR does seem to hint there are other magical schools: Daphne at one point wonders if it’s worth going to the same school as Harry just to go to the same school as everybody important, which supports the theory that there are other magic schools, but that almost everyone influential went through Hogwarts.
In that case, shouldn’t we see evidence of a baby boom occurring immediately following the end of the war, probably in the form of the years after Harry’s being noticeably bigger than those that came before? canon!Harry is rather unobservant, but you’d think he’d have noticed at least that.
Rule of thumb: canon!Harry notices nothing. Nothing. (Unless it’s plot-relevant.)
Harry never tells us anything about the younger students. Unless they happen to be called Ginny/Luna/Colin/Denis/Romilda.
For Harry to notice it would require Rowling to have thought of it. Plus, since it wasn’t really plot relevant it would be something of a violation of Conservation of Detail.
I’d forgotten about that quote.
For reference, it’s
Chapter 74.
Given that they canonically keep tabs on underage witches and wizards with magic, I suspect that they judge based on some combination of how magically promising the prospective student appears to be, what their social connections are (are they related to any highly placed individuals who graduated from Hogwarts?) and possibly some sort of affirmative action for muggle born students.
Actually the ministry has a trace spell, evidently, on the whole of magical Britain. Magical misdemeanors from underage wizards go largely unpoliced in all magical households, explaining the fact that several familys, such as the Malfoys and the Weasleys have sent children to Hogwarts who openly acknowledge having learnt spells outside of Hogwarts. You may recall, once the ministry was in Voldemort’s pocket, the trace was used to track down underaged wizards not in Hogwarts. I’d always supposed Hogwarts worked in conjunction, or possibly with special permissions, from the ministry to use the trace to send letters to children who had performed slight magical acts, such as Harry phasing his cousin through the glass at the snake exhibit.