[ SECRET POST #3357 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3357 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 078 secrets from Secret Submission Post #480.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm more annoyed by the fact that she's decided all of North America = the US, and that there's only one school and four master wand makers for the entire continent.

I mean, having one school for the UK was kind of eyebrow-raising. Having one school for all of Canada, Mexico, and the US is just ridiculous, and makes it pretty obvious that she hasn't actually put a whole lot of thought into what might actually work for areas outside of the UK.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's related to the reason she (typically) smushed thousands of native tribes into one big Native American Culture wad. British people, especially ones who don't think very hard about worldbuilding, have a hard time grasping how outlandishly large the U.S. is. We have states that you could drop her island into and it wouldn't touch the edges, and most of those aren't even the important states. Wyoming is basically spare closet space bigger than her entire nation.

[(Anonymous)]

Or... she was trying to keep the same quaintness of world for the US as the European schools. Which is difficult because you only have borrowed history.

[(Anonymous)]

What about that doesn't say "fundamental lack of comprehension of how this continent even works" to you?

[(Anonymous)]

The part where she was trying her best with a country that has no coherent culture outside of guns and cheeseburgers?

[luxshine]

I can't imagine the horrible quantity of paperwork for a magic child born in Mexico who needed to go to study for 7 years in a school in the USA that for muggle goverment doesn't exist. Given how draconic the procedures to get a VISA are, even if students in general manage a bit easier, I kind of think having the American school IN the USA is the least confortable thing ever.

[ketita]

Or maybe they have completely different borders? If they floo in there's no reason for them to go through all the paperwork. She could have had them not recognizing US borders at all, and having different geopolitical boundaries.

[(Anonymous)]

Unless she really changed the ratio of muggleborn and halfblood wizards to pureblood wizards in North America, that wouldn't really work. Most wizards would still be growing up with the geopolitical boundaries set by muggle society, which would inevitably influence wizarding society.

[luxshine]

Oh, that would make it SO much better. Make the Mexican wizards literal illegal aliens.

Yeah, there's no way that wouldn't be incredibly racist.

[(Anonymous)]

You're really nitpicking, here. Wizards are above the law of their muggle host countries, this shit about visas is one hundred percent irrelevant to Mexican wizards.

[ketita]

I'm pretty sure wizards do not give many shits about muggle visas.

[(Anonymous)]

If she thought about it at all, which I sincerely doubt, I'm guessing she'd just have the students magic their way past border crossings and paperwork - which is its own very special brand of seriously?!

It's really clear that she's coming at it from the perspective of someone who isn't at all familiar with the area she's writing about, on a social, political, or historical level, and hasn't done enough research to paper over the gaps. Even ignoring the cultural failures, the set-up she's imagined just doesn't work logistically speaking.

[luxshine]

I enjoyed the HP books, but man, her world-building is so... absurd. IT just doesn't hold up to any logic

[(Anonymous)]

It didn't bug me in the books, because they were from Harry's perspective, and a pre-teen/teenager having a very shallow understanding of the world around him is reasonable. It's when she started writing articles and other works from a more adult perspective that still had that very shallow, nonsensical level of world-building that it bugged me, since it wasn't possible to pretend it was just the character just being oblivious any more.

[ketita]

She stated that there are 11 major schools WORLDWIDE, and three of them are in Europe. That makes zero sense, and I'm not sure she's very good at counting.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe the magic gene is just more dominant in the European branch of humanity. Could be as simple as that. Some races are better at somethings than others, take people from the Horn of Africa as an example. They are just genetically gifted when it comes to running. Or Sherpas as being genetically better at dealing with altitude. Or Gurkhas who are just genetically better at waging war. Europeans just won the genetic lottery for magic and the rest of the world plays catch up.

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure if troll or just idiot who thinks Lamarck was right.

[(Anonymous)]

She's copped to being shit at counting. 11 schools worldwide doesn't diminish the stupidity of there only being one school for the entirety of North America, though.

The smart thing to do would probably have been to backpedal and say there are more than 11 (that's fewer than two per continent even if they were all spread out evenly!), but if she was married to that number, she could've salvaged the logistics by using the expanded material to mention regional schools that taught local magical traditions or...something less absurd than what she went with.

[caerbannog]

Is it specifically major schools? Some kind of major-school linkage with a board and everything etc?

I could feasibly see lots of little magic "schools" all over the place where the need is.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I had the same thought.

[illiadandoddity]

Yeah, I would have had zero problems with it if she had said there were eleven famous wizarding schools, or that there were only eleven that were particularly historically significant. That leaves room for there to be dozens of smaller schools.

[iggy]

It IS specifically major schools. That's what she said.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm fairly certain that the wizarding world wouldn't need more MAJOR schools, when we know there are other smaller schools aside from them (in GoF there's an American school named the Salem Institute of something, which is not the major American school she's writing about now).

[(Anonymous)]

She's said repeatedly that the Salem Institute isn't a school.

It's a grown witches thing.

[elialshadowpine]

Something I noticed when I went to look up about the schools is that she mentions in a couple places (but not in the article on North American schools) that there are apparently a lot of smaller schools that are more widespread. These are the prestigious ones, comparable to going to Yale or Harvard. I still can't quite stretch myself to believe that there's only one prestigious university (effectively) for wizards in all of NA.