But, Warlocke, what teens are you talking about?

Consider that even if someone was born just before the curse was activated, he'd be 23 when it goes away.

And if someone was a teen in that time. Say, 17 years old, then they are 40 years old.

So basically, we'd have a muggle world completely without children and teens.

But that's just a minor thing.

You asked:

The curse (as I imagined it) would literally cause the muggles to be sterilized. As in both males and females. So there'd be no half-bloods either.

However, we could make a scenario in which Voldemort failed to take into account Goblins and other magical races. Because while he made the virus/curse cause muggles incapable of breeding with each other and with wizards, he simply has overlooked other possibilities.

So your scenario involving muggle/goblin kids could be happening. And it'd be pretty funny too.

 

True enough. I was assuming there would still be squibs born and that, for the purposes of the virus/curse, they would be affected as any muggle would.

But I suppose that still wouldn't make for a very large population of teens, would it?

The adult muggles caught unawares when they were suddenly cured would still make for a ton of unplanned pregnancies.

 

Why does Voldemort choose to sterilise all Muggles instead of kill them?

 

A supply of slave labor to kick start his magical utopia?

 

What can 1000 muggle slaves do in a year that a wizard can't do in a day?

 

Be a thousand Human sacrifices?

Probably a lot of menial manufacturing that wizards wouldn't want to waste time on.

Whatever the hell the wizard(s) in question don't want to or have time to do.

Or whatever pops into (y)our demented mind(s)?

 

Human sacrifice comes back around to Taure's point, and the labour to mine. A supply of warm bodies could be used for rapid magical population expansion though.

 

Hmm, I'll put on my fan fic cap and think about it.

1. Not worth his time. It's the difference between personally (or even via minions) going out and shooting every muggle on earth in the head... and dooming them all by waving your wand once.
2. He's already thinking like an immortal and taking the long view. If you're going to live forever, you can afford to simply wait out the bulk of your enemies, and reserve your direct attention for the ones that make the mistake of irritating you by buzzing around your head.
3. It is godlike in a way that might appeal to a megalomaniac. At the end of the day, even with magic, going around and shooting each of your enemies with a spell isn't that far removed from shooting them all with a gun; a muggle could do it. On the other hand, using arcane knowledge to create a curse that will, with a single invocation of magic, doom them with a plague that is straight out of the old tales of the gods (and, in fact, THE God so many of those filthy muggles love so much)... that is divine intervention wrought by his own godlike hand. (Of course, muggles could do the same with an engineered disease, but who's going to broach that subject with Voldemort?)
4. His sense of irony/pettiness. Many HP stories put forth the notion that, somewhere along the line, Voldemort gave up the ability to reproduce in the course of pursuing immortality. If he can't do it (not that he even wants to - but he wouldn't be the first person who stole a toy they didn't even want to play with, just because he didn't like how much fun the other kid was having), then neither should the muggle vermin.
5. Fear. Voldemort's whole story (and, in fact, Harry's) was set into motion because, at the end of the day, he fears his own mortality. His minions are a barricade, and a nerve-wrackingly friable one at that, between his enemies and his life. The more he sends them out to kill muggles, the higher the chance is that they either get themselves killed (and a dead minion makes a significantly poorer barricade) or worse, somehow reveal his whereabouts to those who would seek to destroy him. That's to say nothing of how fast the chances of him dying go up when he reveals himself in order to personally go out and kill muggles. Even a Dark Lord isn't immune to nightmares where -unlikely though it may be, but that's neurotic fear for ya- the front page of the newspaper is a photo of his corpse sprawled beside a crib, the back of the skull destroyed by a shotgun blast he didn't see coming, below the headline, "Dark Lord DEAD - You-Know-Who killed while trying to murder second infant." Much safer to wait them out.
6. Because it's a cruel and lingering demise, during which he can -with coldly grim glee- watch the muggles panic and despair at the realization that the end is coming so much sooner than they had ever imagined, and Voldemort is nothing if not a cruel bastard.
7. The plot of Goblet of Fire. 'Nuff said.
8. Because he's insane (see number 6).

Much of it depends on how one interprets Voldemort's character.

Even if one doesn't particularly love the idea (like me, for instance), it's not hard to find justifications for it... and, let's face it, there's a lot of fan fic out there that no one even bothered to justify at all.

And as always, if one does not like an idea, it is even easier to dismiss it out of hand...


EDIT: Fuck it, let's fix it in Chrome, since this forum and Firefox seem to hate each other these days. Even without the WYSIWYG editor (fuck you, Chrome), it's still easier than getting a post through in FF, these days.

 

I don't think you have much of a point. Do you have any idea how many homes a 1000 people "properly motivated" can make in a year? And keep in mind that wand magic tends to be temporary (such as transfiguration and charms, and the longer lasting spells iirc become drastically more difficult and power consuming) and even the most mundane buildings can turn out be fiendishly complicated.

You want something to last a long time? You either start out the old fashion way, or you get someone powerful (and smart) enough to make Riddle nervous to make it for you. (aka the four founders of Hogwarts)

The man you says he's not Taure never said anything about sacrifice. I see a big difference between just magically carpet bombing a small village and strapping the villagers to sacrificial alters to get the blessings of dark gods/more magic/make magical monstrosities. Or even just simple curiosity like cutting a muggles head open to try and figure out how to make your golems think.

I can also get behind Warlocke's reasoning in the post above, with the caveat that I think Voldemort would be much more likely to attempt to use method to kill every conceivable threat to him (other wizards).

If Voldemort was in a World War Z type scenario and found he wasn't recognized as human by the dead? Oh boy . . . EDIT* What the hell happened to your post format Warlocke?

 

Personally it feels contrived that magic could sterilize muggles on a world-wide scale and yet not manage to kill muggles on a similar scale, but HP magic has had weirder quirks before.

 

My point is that anything Muggles can build, magic can build better.

 

Yes, using them for slave labor is probably inefficient but there probably are uses for a population of easily controlled muggles beyond physical labor. Unless there's some accountant-omancy I've never heard of, 1,000 magically-controlled muggle accountants to "do the books" might not be a terrible use of non-magical humans, for instance.

 

A Harry Potter/Mistborn The Final Empire crossover. Not much mixing of the magic systems but more so of the setting. It could be after Harry's time with him being The Hero of Ages and the noble the descendants of his friends. Or Harry could take Vin' place. Basically The Final Empire's plot in a Harry Potter world.

 

Maybe he can't. Maybe there is no mega-kill curse, but there is a sterilization curse.

 

Good points, but I didn't mean sterilise with magical virus vs. go around and kill them all with spells. I meant sterilise with magical virius vs kill with magical virus.

Seems to me that if Voldemort can create a magical virus that sterilises all Muggles, he can equally create one that kills them.

Especially as he probably wouldn't even need to create one. Just infect a few Muggles with dragon pox, release them back into the Muggle world in various places around the globe, watch billions die.

After all, we know that dragon pox is deadly, and we know that Muggles can catch it. Given the analogy to smallpox, it likely spreads easily too. It also seems likely that a non-magical immune system cannot effectively fight magical diseases.

The only reason why this hasn't already happened is the Statute of Secrecy:

Of course, given that wizards can catch and be killed by dragon pox too, deliberately introducing it into the Muggle world to create a global pandemic might not be the best idea Voldemort ever had.

 

Okay, I'm not putting my fan fic cap on for this because I look even dorkier in hats.

One could handwave Voldemort not using a curse/virus that outright kills its victims, by simply saying he can't do it. Maybe no one has figured it out because it keeps butting up against one of those rules of magic people can't seem to get around.

Maybe coming up with such a thing was taking too long and he got impatient. He went for the next best thing, making the muggles infertile, telling himself that this curse could start on the job while he finishes concocting the 'real' curse he wants to use.

As for Dragon Pox... muggles can catch it, but so can wizards. Voldemort does have a deeply entrenched reputation in fan fic for torturing and murdering his own supporters at the drop of a hat, but maybe this version would show some restraint and avoid starting an epidemic that could easily threaten the people whose ideals he is supposedly representing.


lol, I'm writing quite a bit about an idea I neither came up with nor particularly like (no offense, Xandrel, just not my cup of tea).



Posted from Chrome because FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK.

 

Voldemort is cruel, he gets pleasure from watching the muggles panic knowing they're about to go extinct.

 

Pretty sure the wizarding world could repopulate the world on its own. Their numbers are vague, but there are at least some thousands of them, and unlike muggles they don't really have to try to survive. Magic makes everything so easy, there's no reason they couldn't make it work, imo.

 

Heh- I now want to see a parody of all those shitty Harry/Hermione Fix-it fics, where they break the statue of secrecy and bring the wizarding world into the 21st century - only in this one, they accidently kill all the muggles with dragon pox/other magical diseases.

 

This isn't really a whole plot bunny. A plot point, maybe? A scene within a story?

Basically, I'd like to see Harry from a non-biased student's POV. We've got the Boy-Who-Lived who's been surrounded by rumours even before he arrived and involved in all types of stuff during Hogwarts. How do the other students see him?

This is basically inspired by how Dresden's perceived in DF. We see how hard it is for him to beat all the Big Bads he goes up against but the supernatural community just sees the results and interprets events from that.

So, does the average Hogwarts student see Harry as a total badass? Dangerously unstable psychopath? Poor, unlucky bastard? All of the above at different times?