What's even funnier is watching where they put Umbridge on that scale.

 

I'm reading the latest from "The Black's Resurgence", and apart from their standard fare - time travel, first significant person met is the pairing's SO, and "blushing to wedding" romance - the thing that grinds my gears the most in this one is the war with Grindelwald

Wizarding trench warfare.

Like, actual trench warfare. Between wizards.

It boggles my mind

 

How would you prefer they fight? I feel like this could be a discussion unto itself, because we never see large-scale battles.

 

There wouldn't really be large scale battles, thats the point. Wizards dont have strategic positions that can be taken via force, and everyone can teleport. The only reasonable exception is something like the battle of Hogwarts, where Voldemort hid a horcrux in the castle and needed to get it before Harry did, who had his side defend the castle long enough for him to destroy it.

What we see in canon is probably the closest a wizarding war could would look like, with a small group of wizards trying to achieve a certain objective, while another group runs interference.

Otherwise there would be mostly targeted attacks/assassinations, that may result in duels between individual powerful wizards.

 

That's pretty close to what I was thinking; I was just trying to come up with a scenario where they would have a battle with armies and squad tactics as a historical reference for a story I'm writing. There were countless wars that took place before Secrecy went into effect and I can only think that the wizards must have not taken part in them, or else editing out their involvement would not have been as simple as memory charming a few people.

 

I mean... What would wizards fight for?

Land? Religion? Power? Inheritance?

Land is easy enough to rule out by dint of the fact that wizards beat muggles at pretty much any time in history. Whatever the spells put on the Leaky Cauldron / Quidditch World Cup Stadium, they keep muggles away. If you need someone to work the field, then there's squibs, house elves, or muggles potioned or charmed to the gills.

I don't think we see any wizards refer to a god, or blaspheme. They generally swear by Merlin, if anything.

Power and Inheritance are where it gets tricky. Inheritance is likely small scale, in that one branch of a family fights another. Maybe some married allies or friends get called in, but would this be over a title (if one exists?), the ancestral home, or the money? Power leads us to Voldemort.

Honestly, if wizards just don't treat muggles as humans, they don't really have a need for war. Just flat out steal and obliviate.

 

Thinking about it, i’d guess… wizards wouldn’t fight on the fields. With the world as set up, you’d have the majority of wizards just… not care.

And those involved - motivated by power, greed, humanity or just wanting to be involved in shaping nations - subterfuge would be the name of the game. Advisors, spies. And once both sides have wizards involved - otherwise the side without them loses - it’s about wizard v wizard conflict. Disable, remove, or just flat out kill the other side wizards before the actual battle.

Hurling spells on the battlefield with thousands of men is the stupidest way to go about things, in the magical world of harry potter.

edit: to add: “large scale battle” is a thing in magical systems which are more about “lakes of fire, rain of acid” and less about “packing stuff with a wand and undetectable extension charm”. It’s a very “i can see this in a movie” kind of thing, but not really something in this specific setting.

 

Authors shoving Celtic holy days and traditions as the default for magical society. As usually seen with the pretentious use of "Samhaim" instead of Halloween. The Hogwarts Founders had mostly Germanic names, while the pureblood families usually have Germanic or Norman surnames, and "Wizengamot" comes from the Germanic "Witenagemot", making it evident that, much like their muggle counterparts, English wizards descend from Anglo-Saxons and Normans, not the Celtic Britons. Entirely different cultures, people. Not that Rowling's world-building has any consistency, but if you want to shove in some pseudo-pagan folklore at least stick to the right ethnic group, for fuck's sake.

 

Lack of scale in scifi wars.

A common problem in scifi is for authors to write about "large" conflicts only containing millions or low tens of millions of personnel on each side, in conflicts between nations/planets/systems/whatever containing billions of people. This does not make much sense.

For example in 1945 the US had ~12 million men under arms, with a population of only 139 million people, or about 8.7% of the population. So, ignoring the fact that advanced technology probably increase the age band suitable for service, and the fact scifi generally has women being treated as equals, there should be no lack of people to serve. If you have a population of 10 billion people, I would expect something like at least a billion people under arms, and probably quite more.

I have seen people go "ah, but space wars are expensive, they need all those people at homes in the factories to fuel the war machine!", and yes, the future conflict (be it Earth based or space based) will be costly, but future conflicts come with future production capabilities. Any conflict set more than 100 years into the future almost certainly has massive automation. In such a society, production is highly decoupled from population.

It would be fair if they discussed how the number of people wanting to serve greatly outstripped equipment and transport, but is almost never brought up. I only know of one story that does discuss this, and in universe the problem is solved by setting a minimum service age of 100 years (which works because they have biological immortality), while directing most young people towards the sciences and engineering, as weapon design and research is less automatable.

I think part of it is that writers have trouble even conceptualising the military casualties. Losing more than 1 million people in a battle was exceptional in history, limited to the siege of Leningrad or the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin. But such a thing would be commonplace in a conflict where each side has hundreds of millions to billions under arms.

 

I think the bigger problem is the general lack of scale in sci fi settings, with entire planets being often more comparable to small countries, be it the size of their infastructure, their population size or even just the diversity of climate and cultures.

 

I've been keeping up, but I haven't seen anything like trench warfare other than some metaphorical city based guerilla shit. Your other TBR rants are completely fair, but I enjoy it. But there hasn't been any real trench warfare unless you're trying to do some major stretching.

There is, literally, no trench warfare. TBR has plenty of flaws in his narratives, but I'd rather people not fabricate reasons to dislike it when there's plenty of real reasons to dislike it. Even if I enjoy it.

Like, actual, per your words, it's all been city fighting so far outside of Gellert and Harry's actual, magical, confrontation - still no trenches, with some fun centers of government being immolated and some Grindelwaldians being strung up by street lamps.

I've re-turboread the past dozen or so chapters, whereby we get to Grindlewald's incursion. There's literally no trenches. Ever. Or anything that can metaphorically be treated as trenches.

For real though, there's no trench warfare anywhere. There's no facsimile of trench warfare anywhere.

I'm perplexed by the criticism, especially when TBR has plenty of actual, deserved, pieces of criticism.

 

The word trench never even appears in the story.

I think it's mostly been urban warfare, with the first big battle having taken place in the streets of the magical district of Warsaw. The latest one took place in and around the Belgian Ministry building. It's not exactly a bunch of wizards huddling in the Ardennes...

There's a bit of business in the most recent chapter about the country being too hard for Grindelwald's forces to keep and defend without the defenses that the Ministry building provides. It's not explained in detail, and the excuse might be a bit flimsy for some people's tastes, but it's there.

Spoiler

Grindelwald, himself, complains that, without that building, they'll have to expend too many people defending the territory. Someone else mentions that losing that building will make the country worthless to Grindelwald, because replacing the infrastructure would take too much effort.

I love it when this comes up; it's so "25 years of Harry Potter trivia." Let's go...

No less a pureblood wizard than Draco does so when he exclaims, "God, this place is going to the dogs." right before Hagrid's infamous Hippogriff lesson. He also says, "My God, my father told me about it ages ago..." when he realizes Ron doesn't yet know about the Triwizard Tournament.

Sirius obliquely refers to God, by singing "God Rest Ye, Merry Hippogriffs."

Of course, you don't have to believe in a particular deity to use their name in vain.

Lupin says, "My God." when he sees the newspaper photo of 'Scabbers' with the Weasleys.

Cornelius Fudge exclaims "My God!" when he sees Cedric's dead body. He also said "...he blew up his aunt, for God's sake!" at Harry's court hearing.

Ted Tonks says, "Ah, God bless 'em," when he's told about some students attempting to steal Gryffindor's sword from Snape's office. Then again, he is a muggleborn.

Ron says, "Thank God" a couple of times: Once when stepping out of the winter cold and into the warmth of Honeydukes, once when he mentions that Snape doesn't eat with them at Grimmauld Place, once when he mentions that Muriel doesn't come by for Christmas anymore, and again when stating that Rose inherited her mother's brains on the train platform in the epilogue. He also says, "God, that's revolting." about the coffee when they go to the diner, after fleeing Bill and Fleur's wedding.

Molly thanks God repeatedly when Bill and Fleur finally show up, following the Seven Harry Potters fiasco (they were probably off boning, somewhere, before the polyjuice could wear off; waste not, want not).

 

Kinda related - when there's an endless number of disposable mook Death Eaters. At least before Voldemort's takeover, it was clear that their number was extremely limited (maybe 30 at best) and they were rarely caught, likely due to their hit and run mod of operation rather than particular prowess. I see British wizarding society numbering no more than 5000 wizards and witches, yet according to certain fanfiction writers there are hundreds of Death Eaters for Voldemort to throw before him as meat shields.

 

I stand entirely corrected!

 

It's not like they stand out in memory, is it? An exclamation of 'Thank God!' or 'My God!' is sort of the vanilla of the religious oaths world: They just blend in because it's normal for them to be there.

Now, if Harry had told Hermione to 'shut up and quit acting the cunt' in HBP, we'd all remember that exclamation.

 

@MonkeyEpoxy @Warlocke

eh… spoiler alert then?

there are three tiers of “last available”

- patreon library, available for patrons
- password protected library, password available for free on discord
- ffnet

each is roughly 20-30 chapters ahead of the next “level”.

 

Look at this posh git with 'is restricted secret access, only exists in an alternate dimension, "I'm using a Time-Turner to read stuff," fan fiction.

Here, we only deal with currently available homemade fake stories about what never happened to people who don't really exist based on a professionally made fake story about that which never happened to people who don't really exist, not "theoretically might exist in the future" homemade fake stories about what never happened to people who don't really exist based on a professionally made fake story about that which never happened to people who don't really exist, thank you very much.

I can't make it any clearer than that.

 

Lol. Imagine paying for fanfiction.

Aight. I'm gonna get mad because tards are buying early access

 

@MonkeyEpoxy - the library is free, you just need to access the Discord. I don't Patron any ff author.

@Warlocke - We also help each other make homemade fake stories about what never happened to people who don't really exist based on professionally made fake story about which never happened to people who don't really exist, and sometimes even crossover them with other - home- or professionally - made stories or series of stories which happened to people who don't really exist.

Long story short, there definitely is a wizard trench warfare in the non too distant future, and it definitely is very stupid.

 

Y i k e s