I rolled my eyes the second he pulled out math and started crunching numbers. I understand the motive behind trying to make story plots reasonable and logical, but come on...when did it become too much to just sit back and enjoy a story, faults or otherwise?

Fine, you can't stomach the idea of wizards vs. muggles. No big deal; that's completely understandable. But leaving a bloated review like that just makes you come off as a pretentious turd.

 

Nor I. I enjoyed this a great deal.

4/5

 

Just to add irony, it's also completely completely and utterly ridiculous from a scientific perspective. Any such indirect calculation is meaningless as a comparison of actual capability because to be otherwise, it assumes a lot of things about the inner workings of magic that might or might not be true.

hey guys this summer i got lazy on the exercise and gained about five pounds. by E = mc^2 that must mean my fat ass has powah of 40 jiggawatts and that means i can throw people in orbit. trololol.

Christ.

 

When the premise of the story was so ridiculous that suspension of disbelief was impossible? It's kind of like asking someone to not analyse a story where the modern-day U.S. was conquered by the Aztecs.

 

Except, you know, conjuration is the direct creation of matter from nothing, whereas the fat in your body was acquired from food you've eaten. Shit analogy is shit.

If you read the review, you will see that:

A) I don't endorse the "magic as energy" view. I only consider it because some people like to think that way, and it's easier to convince people through an argument that utilises their own paradigm. If you think, for example, that it makes no sense to calculate the energy of a conjuration spells and then say that this is a minimum amount of energy a wizard has, because it's magic, not energy, then congratulations! You're in agreement with me. There are many, however, who think that a wizard is little more than a battery. The argument was for them.

B) You will notice that the argument comes in two parts: 1. Do wizards have the energy? 2. Do wizards have the spells to use that energy to achieve the correct results? The second point is presumably what you're talking about with the "inner workings of magic".

In the case of creation of food, wizards have the energy but not the spells. The exceptions to Gamp's law seems to prevent it. This is the same reason why we're not going to see a wizard destroy the planet in one spell - they may have the energy, but they don't have the spell. On the other hand, in the case of stopping physical objects, wizards have multiple spells to achieve this.

 

That depends on your view of conjuration though. You could say it's the creation of matter from magic, whereby magic is already a form of energy.

It's not the way I see it, but I don't think science has anything to do with magic anyway.

 

I don't think it's healthy to try to analyze JKR's magic system with scientific method. Too much inconsistencies.

I personally think this story is good and enjoyable, but it's way too short. It felt like just an idea, maybe a plot bunny, that's being written rather than a full story.

 

Well, sure, if you change canon then you can do whatever you like.

 

Correct or not, you still come off as a pretentious turd.

 

Certainly this fic is well written, but as anyone who read any of the Wizard vs. Muggle threads knows I'm vehemently of the opinion that muggles couldn't do diddly to wizards. However, as I say, well written and if I ignore my opinions and just go with the ride, its not too bad.

4/5

 

Sigh. There is a pair of physical feats: (1) increasing your total energy, (2) throwing people far. A great amount of the former can be achieved by eating twinkies and arguing on the internet instead of exercising, yet this indicates almost nothing whatsoever as to ability to do the latter.

You correctly point out that connecting them is riduluous because you understand the mechanism of (1) and therefore judge that it is completely irrelevant to (2). That's exactly my point: knowledge of the underlying mechanisms enables you to do this.

Its flipside is a pair of magical feats: (1) conjuring material objects, (2) stopping things without conjuration. Is the ability to do one relevant to the other? There is no correct universal answer, because the mechanisms behind both are not determined from on high... and are completely up to the author.


If you've got a hate-on for muggle supremacy, fine. Go argue that it magical supremacy makes better stories or list the ways this story and others like it failed utterly. Maybe it's always true; I'm not going to argue one way or another about that (and I wasn't very impressed with this particular story). But if you think simply throwing a bunch of equations together makes a scientific argument about any of this, then you don't understand science.

We can make the assumption that magic itself is completely unlimited in energy and all other important ways. So what? That doesn't mean the spells themselves are unlimited. It's one thing to say "wizards can do anything whatsoever with the right spell." It's quite another to say that they already have a spell for it or are always capable of creating one.

According to you, they do. Arresto momentum + finite incatatem. On the Moon. Everything dies. Easy as pie.

Or heck, accio moon. Because spells have no limits whatsoever, amirite?

 

You read a seven book series that told you that magic existed behind the scenes of everyday life and bought it entirely...

 

Vorpal, it comes down (for me at least) to whats reasonable. A wizard being able to shield himself against an army of muggles, perfectly fine. Summoning the moon? Thats just silly. Why? Because any story you write where a character summons the moon...is just silly. But a story where a single wizard makes a stand against a muggle army, and proves himself the better because of his magic. That works perfectly.

 

You draw the most ridiculous analogies. Not to mention putting words into my mouth.

There are so many ways in which using "Arresto momentum" on the moon is disanalogous.

For a start, distance. HP wizards clearly have a distance limitation. It's extremely rare to see a HP piece of magic which affects anything other than the wizard's immediate surroundings. And we don't know how those are cast. E.g. the Taboo.

Secondly, appropriateness of the spell. We know that the shield charm or the Imperturbable charm can be used to stop/deflect smallish physical things. We also know some of their limitations - in DH, in Bellatrix's vault, we saw that the characters had no defence against crushing. Bullets are clearly part of the class of things these spells could apply to. The moon, on the other hand, is - I think - very doubtful to be one of those things in the class of acceptable objects for the summoning charm. So the question isn't about whether there's a spell for it. It's whether or not the spell has the power to stop fast things.

The argument regarding conjuration is there to show that - if you treat magic as a quasi-physical energy that a wizard possesses like a battery and uses to fuel his spells - then a wizard has the energy. If you want to say that a wizard doesn't have one store of quasi-physical energy from which he fuels all his spells then congratulations, you agree with me. The argument has been successful. We can agree that magic has nothing to do with energy and that talking about physics (e.g. magic can't stop bullets because they have lots of kinetic energy) is just ridiculous because magic isn't part of that system.

On the topic of science, I'm struggling to find where I made any claim to be "doing science". Any idea of doing science towards on fictional magical universe would be absurd. All I'm doing is treating magic as quasi-physical.

And once again, because you seem incapable of reading - or maybe you like to read things into my posts that aren't there - I need to say that the above argument about wizard's energy is not an argument I endorse. It's a rhetorical strategy and I declared it as such several times during the argument.

 

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The limits of magic should be whatever tells a good story effectively, and that's up to the author.

Can a good story be told a wizard stands up to an army and comes out on top, thus proving the attitudes of his community? I think so.
Can a good story be told where a community of specially-powered individuals finds out they're not quite as super as they thought and get taken down hard? I think so as well, though I wouldn't call this one such a story.

Though perhaps I'm wrong on the last part. But one way or another, that's not an issue that's going to be decided by going 'lolz conjurashun jiggajoules'. That's an argument that's completely retarded.

Full stop. I'm going to type this slowly, because you're apparently mentally handicapped.
Once you admit one limitation to your spells, there is no logical reason whatsoever to exclude any other.
Of course whether some limitations make better stories than others is a different question, but that's not the argument you made.

ETA:

So what? My ass has the energy to kill all life on earth, but no ability to tap it for that particular purpose.
A wizard might have the energy to do X, but whether he is actually able to do so is a completely different question. Your entire argument is irrelevant, because it only shows that it's consistent for a single wizard to stop armies, not that it's unreasonable for them not to have such ability. Maybe they're just not clever enough to invent the spells that have such power.

 

Logical reason? Sure. No logical reason. But logic has very little to do with it. We're talking about canon here*. The only limitations I'm going to accept are those that definitely exist in canon. Just because something is logically possible it doesn't mean it's true of the canon Potter universe. It's logically possible that every spell is actually composed of millions of subatmoic pixies that breed in a wizard's small intestine.


*If we're not talking about canon, then I'm not sure why we're talking at all.

Edit for your edit: Did you read the damn post? We've already covered whether or not wizards have the spell to stop bullets. It's a matter of if they have the energy to fuel the spells, which they do.

I know what you're going to say to that already, so I'll counter it now. You're going to say that you don't think that just because a wizard has the power for a conjuration, it doesn't mean he can put the same amount of power into his shield spell. That is: a wizard does not have a single unified power source from which his spells a fuelled like electronics running off a battery.

To which I completely agree. Once you say that you have rejected the "wizard has a store of magical energy which behaves roughly like physical energy" paradigm. Which is my preference. The only reason why I include the argument about energy as I did is because the vast majority of the fandom disagrees with you. 99% of stories treat wizards as having a store of energy which behaves like physical energy and from which all their spells are fuelled.

 

I would disagree with the latter, on the basis of canon. As all the arguments presented in all the Wizard vs. Muggle threads show, wizards can defend against everything muggles can do, based solely on canon evidence.

 

Thread successfully derailed.

 

I blame Rymrock entirely.

 

I blame your stubbornness, your amazing quality of never being wrong, and your ability to turn any simple argument into a wall of text.