As they say on the playground... scoreboard. Still an animagus.

 

Perhaps the meaning we should derive from this is that the process of becoming an animagus isn't as prohibitively difficult as is commonly believed, and what keeps most people from attempting it is not the cost, but the benefit.

 

The thing is, we know that Sirius and James were magically accomplished without working hard:

It would appear that Sirius and James smashed their OWLs (i.e. got Outstandings) without studying for them at all.

 

Was it this effortless for Hermione though? She was always prattling on about revision and studying in fifth year.

 

It was not, nor was it for Lupin, which is why people generally put Hermione and Lupin in a lower "power tier" than Sirius and James (along with stuff like animagus, Marauder's Map, non-verbal magic before 6th year, etc).

 

And yet I would argue that putting James/Sirius/Lily on the same tier as Mcgonagall or Bellatrix is mistaking potential for actual skill. I very much doubt that a twenty-something-year-old James, no matter how talented, would be in any way equal to an adult Snape or (an even more adult) Mcgonagall. Sirius, of course, also spent 13 years in hell, on top of stopping his magical development at a similar age, so I have trouble thinking of him as particularly powerfull too.

 

You say that, yet you have no problems using Bellatrix in that comparison despite her spending the better part of two decades drooling and screaming on the floor in worse condition than Sirius.

 

Another possible explanation is that Sirius and James are overconfident teenagers and while they generally did well in school, they either overstated the grades they got, or they had already studied the material they needed by the time this scene took place. I can see how genetics would go pretty far, but it wouldn't inform them of the five exceptions to Gamp's Law.

 

Sirius et al still went to class, so that's where they got their knowledge.

The difference here is the the kind of person who needs to study to learn things vs. the kind of person who only needs to hear something once, it immediately makes sense to them and they remember it.

This goes to a more fundamental point about the nature of magical talent. In short, after you've finished the Hogwarts' curriculum, magical development gains are likely to be marginal at best. The best clue here is the Voldemort vs Dumbledore duel in OotP.

If you look at the Dumbledore vs Voldemort duel in OotP, what is there? Animation, animate transfiguration, conjuration, levitation, curses, apparition. All of it covered at Hogwarts. The only spell that isn't really within Hogwarts' curriculum (that we know of) is the unknown powerful spell that Dumbledore uses. But there are plenty of incapacitating spells on the Hogwarts' curriculum that can take that spell's place.

What makes Dumbledore and Voldemort dangerous is that they can execute this well-known magic quickly, powerfully, at scale, and in a sophisticated manner. It's not that they know secret, powerful spells. It's that they're so much better at the same magic that everyone else knows. We know this talent is already fully established by the time they leave Hogwarts - contributions to scholarly journals while still students, showing examiners things they have never seen before, etc.

By way of example: any NEWT Transfiguration student could probably animate one of those statutes, but they'd probably need multiple attempts over maybe 30 minutes to do it, and probably its behaviour would be less sophisticated. Dumbledore can imbue a number of them with sophisticated behaviour at the flick of a wand.

So I doubt that, for example, Voldemort at 60 is much more dangerous than he was at 18 already. Sure, Voldemort at 60 has likely collected a wider knowledge of obscure items of magic. But the utility of these skills is likely to be limited to niche applications. That's not to say they aren't powerful or useful (something like possession is definitely a powerful skill), it's just that they are narrow specialisms compared to the fundamentals laid down at Hogwarts which already cover 97% of the things you'd want to do with magic.

In a completely fair fight, would a 60 year old Voldemort beat an 18 year old Voldemort? Sure. He has a marginal advantage, but an advantage nonetheless. But it would still be a very close contest.

 

I can't believe you people bumped this thread. The more I think about this the more I think the idea was kind of dumb. I didn't do anywhere near enough to describe what I meant by power.

 

It also needs to be pointed out that over half the students every year aren't good enough at Charms or Transfiguration, so they can't even take the NEWT classes which is were a lot of the more 'powerful'/advanced magic is. Any wizard that takes NEWT level Defense, Transfiguration, and Charms together will automatically be one of the better wizards in the nation because it is rare for students to have the ability to do that. This is one of the reasons Aurors are considered to be good wizards because they need those classes to even apply.

 

I'm ready for a hypothetical 7th year update of Flying With Fawkes with more freaky phoenix shit and a more masterful Harry kinda just sayin.

 

This actually mirrors also the development of any "muggle" skill generally. Science is one area in which extensive amounts of both knowledge and skill are required, but yet most scientists peak in their 20s or 30s at the latest. This is, I think, because once you've learned the fundamentals of e.g. physics, learning new concepts in it is more or less a trivial task, so that you're not significantly advantaged by simply knowing a vast amount of details in physics as long as you have the fundamentals right. It's an interesting thought, Taure.

 

Somewhat more importantly, magic is weird in that generally, knowledge in any field can become useful in a fight. Meanwhile, no matter how much calculus you know, it's not going to help when it comes to fisticuffs with another person. Similarly, no amount of knowledge of history is going to help you when you get into a knife fight with a terrorist. By contrast, knowledge of transfiguration, curses and counter-curses, and charms, are very likely to give you the ability to either fight, or get out of a fight.

Bellatrix isn't more dangerous than, say, Molly Weasley because of an innate amount of magical talent. Bellatrix is a seriously mentally deranged woman with access to a loaded gun and the desire to use it. Given sufficient motivation though, Molly Weasley is demonstrably capable of beating Bellatrix in combat.

 

It helps that they can immediately apply those concepts and see if it works, which reinforces their learning.

I wonder what would happen if someone like Ron, after his Hogwarts years, gained enough motivation to re-tackle the magic he knows in an effort "fix" his instinct and gain more depth of knowledge. What kind of change would that bring to his magical prowess? I suppose instinct is something that's very hard to change, especially as you get older. I suppose it could also be said that when learning something for the first time, you have a higher chance of developing good instinct than when you've already developed a subpar instinct after years of learning something. In that case, you have to both undo some of your intuition while building better intuition.

Also, related to the idea of reinforcing learning through application, if you can already perform a spell with subpar instinct, then it can be hard to tell when you actually are improving it. In the process of getting better, your magic abilities might actually have to regress a bit as you break down your subpar instincts and understanding before you develop better understanding and instinct to surpass your old abilities.

Overall, I think that the first time you are learning magic (in Hogwarts) is where genius is most likely to show. However, I personally hate the idea of it being fixed like that. So I would say that it's possible to improve even after your Hogwarts years, but it would be harder than if they had given it their best effort the first time.

Now I actually feel like writing a story about Ron or Hermione wanting to reach a Dumbledore level of magic after their Hogwarts years.

Edit: Hogwarts is also a better environment for learning than what you will likely find post-Hogwarts. I suppose taking that into account with the fact that a person will have to spend years backtracking and retracking in an effort to improve will turn most people off of developing a better instinct and understanding of magic. Instead, they will stick to their current habits, with their flawed understanding and poor instincts, resulting in a weaker magic. Any magic they learn after Hogwarts will be connected to their flawed understanding and instincts, so simply learning more magic won't put them on the right track to reaching a Dumbledorean level.

Hermione is the best character to work with if you want to explore the instinctual side of learning magic. We already have enough stories where the character simply starts reading books on magic theory to improve. I think it would be more interesting to explore this journey with a character that is already well-read. She studies a lot and is motivated to learn. It would a very introspective fic and delve deep into the aspects of magic most people kind of gloss by.

Even Taure kind of glosses over the instinctual side of learning in Victoria Potter. She seems to already have good instincts and continues to develop by those lines.

I remember there was this one mathematician, Terrence Tao I think, who mentioned that the process of mathematics involved 3 phases where by the end, you should use the mathematical rigour to "destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition." He also mentioned how "All too often, one ends up discarding one’s initial intuition and is only able to process mathematics at a formal level, thus getting stalled at the second stage of one’s mathematical education." I think Hermione would be closer to this stage of magic, though she does understand that there is more to magic than the rigorous theory.

I'm worried that i may be a bit incoherent due to improper word choices. For example, I'm pretty sure I used the words instinct and intuition synonymously and I'm not sure if they mean the same thing. I tend to be very bad at explaining my thoughts. I also have really bad reading comprehension due to this same issue.

 

Hermione is absolutely the worst character if you want to rely on a character's natural ability to intuit/instinctually understand magic. She's patently terrible at it, and analytical intelligence does not help someone change their instinctual understand of something (though it certainly helps them logically analyze it). Keep in mind, instinct and intuition are something that comes naturally. Mr. Tao's assertion that you will eventually be able to "think your way into good intuition" may be true in a logically consistent field like math, but magic, almost by definition, doesn't make logical sense. By contrast, a character like Harry (who often just basically rolls with the punches without really caring if he understands what's going on) displays a deep ability to make inferences on when magic will work (the patronus, wand lore, etc.). Even Ron, who is deeply familiar with magic, would be better for the framework you're suggesting (a character has a desire to suddenly understand something about magic that they've previously not understood/taken for granted, which leads them on a journey to explore magics not commonly known).

The real problem is, there's no amount of studying that make you a Dumbledore level prodigy. This is a wizard who was taking 'basic' magic (pre-OWL coursework) and demonstrating results that the examiners had never seen before. There's no amount of studying or apprenticing under a person that will recapture that conflux of contributing factors. Dumbledore is the kind of person in real life that develops calculus from reading a algebra primer.

 

I wanted to pick Hermione because I think she is lacking in intuition. And my interest lies in exploring the idea of someone trying to change the way that they think in order to become a genius at magic. It's not as simple as studying harder. I agree with that. That's why I think it's more interesting to work with a character who hasn't shown the type of intuition someone like Harry or his parents have.

Edit:

Regardless of if it's true in real life or not, it won't be in my fic. Or atleast, it won't exclusively be limited to natural inheritance in my fic.