Substitute the nuke for a chernobyl type situation where a nuclear reactor explodes. Can a shield protect you from that? Whether the wizard dies in that scenario or not should not really depend on whether the engineer that fucked up did so maliciously or not imo, far too arbitrary that.

 

How did you vote on physical phenomena overcoming magic? Because you're describing physical phenomena overcoming magic.

 

I assume you mean this one:
Depiction of technology being able to overcome or circumvent magic.

In which case I would argue that the two are unrelated. I'm not saying that you could not defend yourself from a nuclear bomb (fuck just dig deep enough and even if you are a Muggle you'll be fine). But a wizard waltzing into a nuclear test site shouldn't be able to cast a quick Protego and be completely fine. That just seems more godly than human.

 

Again, you're focusing on the wrong point. It's not about the logic behind magic for me; it's the effect it has on the story. Having a wizard be at ground zero of the Chernobyl distaster is very much a Man vs Society conflict with a side of Man vs Environment so the focus of the story is less about whether the protagonist can deal with the environmental hazard of the radiation but more on working out how/why it happened and preventing it from happening again.

In this type of story it may make sense for the shield charm to protect against radiation. We've seen repeatedly that as a wizard progresses in skill they become able to broaden the scope of a spell to cover areas that other spells already do. The way I see it, a shield charm cast by a wizard who has mastered the spell can protect against anything but the killing curse, no matter the source. If it would harm the wizard, it can be protected against.

However, that's not to say that it wouldn't be easier to cast a different spell to cover the same effect. If I was writing a canon-esque Wizard in Chernobyl story I'd actually go for the flame freezing charm as the better alternative because it metaphorically corresponds to the kind of harm the wizard wants to protect against. It would, in my mind, need a lower skill level to successfully protect against radiation than the shield charm.

That said, if I was writing Wizard in Chernobyl story the way I'd envision it, I'd probably have the first few wizards to go in actually fail at the spell or have it not work as they thought it would. Maybe they go in thinking shield charms will work but they're just not good enough to protect against everything. I'd do this because Chernobyl is about something that has never occurred on this planet before and I'd want to keep that feeling going until at least mid-way into the story.

 

Hey, I'm no longer the lone lesbian/gay person.

 

Bi gang is strong too.

 

@Niez

Voldemort was conditionally immortal, how does that rank on the human to god scale?

The Shield Charm doesn't protect you from a bullet because it tanks the kinetic energy, it protects you because it is the magical manifestation of the concept of protection.

 

Which means it can also be used as contraception.

Don't try to argue with me; as far as I'm concerned, it's canon now.

 

Thats the true reason why the Shield Hats of the Weasley twins were so popular.

 

I don't understand the difference.

Edit: I thought I understood it after a bit, but now I'm just more convinced I don't. It sounds like you're saying that the interaction between the nuke and the shield charm depends on the type of story you are trying to tell, but in that case, I fell like you would have to change the magic system itself so that its interaction with nonmagical forces is different, in which case I don't see how you can even answer the question in the survey. The question doesn't mention anything about the context of the scenario within a fanfic.

 

Yes, the point here is that there is no correct answer. Magic is not real, you cannot test for it, the only objective information we have is the books. From there you can only infer.

Aekiels answer, and I agree with it, is that the the best way for it to work depends on the type of story you are trying to tell.

And so the point you make about the question on the survey is extremely valid. These are the differences between subjective and objective truths. The survey does not determine which is the correct thing to believe, it only determines how people feel about the topic in question.

 

I see. My purpose in asking these questions wasn't to determine the truth of the mechanics of magic. Instead, I was interested in how the people who answered "no" to the shield charm blocking the nuke but "yes" to blocking bullets and the other option interpreted magic to work. I already have my own interpretation that informed my response, but I'm curious about others' interpretations.

I don't completely understand the mechanics of aekiel's interpretation of the shield charm. I understand that it's based on the type of story the author is trying to tell to some extent, but I don't understand why you would want to interpret that way or why you even need to. It's why I'm worried I'm misinterpreting his answer.

 

Simply put, I adapt the magic to the story I want to tell. A noir type story doesn't work if you can cast a spell and tell exactly what happened in a place 12 hours ago, so I'd choose not to include that kind of spell in the story. If I was to write a high fantasy epic with HP magic it would fit right in, however, because the focus of the story isn't on fighting to discover every detail to put them all together; it's to work out what the bad guy's plan is and stop it in time.

In regards to the shield charm, it's been shown to be adaptable based on the skill level of the character wielding it. Harry in GoF would not have been able to use the shield charm to separate two people during a fight as he did in DH, for example. However, the top tier of spellcasting when it comes to the shield charm isn't explored because Harry never runs into a situation where he'd need to cast it absolutely perfectly in order to survive. So we have to deduce what it's capable of based on supposition and the internally consistent logic of the books.

Combining these two points you come to one conclusion: Magic is a plot device. The hows and whys of magic matter less than the effect it has on the story, so whether the shield charm can stop a nuke is entirely down to what kind of story you're telling. If you're writing a high fantasy wizard vs muggles curbstomp then being able to stop a nuke with a wave of a wand is entirely within possibility. If you're writing a gritty war story where everything is fucked and the horrors of war are a major theme then, well, a nuke is probably not going to be stopped, or if it is it's due to luck or getting to it before it goes off.

Side thought: Would the Impediment jinx be able to stop nuclear fusion if you cast it at the right moment?

That's why I stipulated that the story is the most important part of whether magic is capable of something or not, because magic exists to further the plot in an interesting way, not to be something tangential to it that adds flavour to the world.

 

I liked the survey this year, Taure. It felt more relevant.

It also made me realize how far I've fallen from the HP fandom. Feels weird, man.

 

I'm a little surprised with how much my tastes still seem to be closely aligned with the majority here, as removed as I've become from the fandom in general.

 

I didn't expect to see that many votes for dodging as an effective strategy. It feels too muggle-ish and I always thought that it was like playing dodgeball with faster projectiles. I see it as a once in a while trick, not something to be built around though.

 

..That one person who said the original books aren't canon

 

It gets worse, there's two of them now. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

And the fourteen of you who voted for Cursed Child, get out here and explain yourselves. Answers not deemed up to standard will result in a swift trip to the Hall of Shame(which I hereby suggest be rechristened to Azkaban, though few among us shall ever see it and live to tell the tale).

 

One of the fourteen here: CC isn't just a throw away tweet/thought/etc, it's a story that JKR helped devise and write and presumably had final say in. Just because it's bad doesn't mean it isn't canon, sadly. And just like the other elements of canon that I don't care for, I tend to ignore it for fanfiction purposes.

 

Burn the witch!

But take his wand away first.