NINJA'D!!! There are hyperlinks inserted into the periods in his post, bro...

 

Forgot to say... what, you think Hagrid's the only half-giant out there? You shouldn't believe every folk tale you hear, but the deep woods of Minnesota hold many a mystery, dontchaknow.

As for the vodun- worst case of bad Statute enforcement in the northern hemisphere. Hedge wizards toss potion mixes that make muggles think they're dead and have to obey their commands. The only reason things aren't handled more tightly down there is that the local practitioners are under a vow not to tease the white tourists unless they misbehave.

The French Quarter is basically Diagon Alley without a muggle-repelling charm in place. See MIB charter as mentioned above as to how that's being managed. (Baywatch, man.)

I mean... I'm sorry, what were you asking? No there ain't no such thing as magic. Don't be ridiculous. Have you registered on Pottermore yet?

 

Or best case of misdirection/hiding in plain sight?

 

Whole problem with this boondoggle is that any interpretation of wizarding life in America will, since there's such a tiny amount of canonical information, inevitably swerve towards the writer's interpretation of America's society and history - which is why you get so many ditzy Americans writing fics where America's a wonderful paradise where All Men Are Created Equal (except the wizards who are created better). Taure is a massive pedant so he immediately whips up a historical analysis that still highlights his Euroboner. blazzano honed in on class rivalry and Native Americans. mknote on north vs south conflict. Warlocke on America being a refuge from European turmoil. Riley immediately leaps onto Dresden and starts dry-humping. And wordhammer is very likely either from or incredibly fond of New Orleans.

Everyone's taking a tiny handful of traits they'd use if asked to describe America in a short sentence and building a magical society on it. But the state of Britain in canon blows this approach all to hell. Me, I'd take the fact that England ruled the largest Empire the world's ever known a mere ninety years ago, factor in the time lag that the wizarding world seems to experience, and come to the conclusion that Britannia still Rules the Waves in the Wizarding world. But it doesn't - quite the opposite, really, since it's either a backwards, insular, stagnant little corner of the world or wizards everywhere are just that pathetic.

You want a 'canonical' view of America? Try to imagine what a woman who said she built the entire Harry Potter world based on her everyday experiences would do. Harry got a sharper spotlight on the loss of his parents in book one because JK's mother died. Dementors were introduced in the third book because she was diagnosed as clinically depressed. Ron was a friend of hers in primary school, Dumbledore was her headmaster. Hermione was her as a kid. Harry's entire arc is so blatant that she's lucky the Bible is public domain, and we've already gone over how grown-up Harry is her secret little fantasy.

So what would America be like? It would be an entire society of the most prominent American she had ever encountered. I can say with some pretty damn solid certainty that she didn't meet any Americans that stuck in the mind before writing the books, hence it's complete lack of appearance.

 

Yeah, that's bogus, but also a symptom of poor writing.

Are you kidding? With my complete and genuine apathy toward America right now, and my lack of desire to do any patriotic chest-beating, I'm the perfect person to formulate a magical America...

If I ever finished anything I wrote.

An interesting analysis.

 

Take a stereotyped view of America/cans. Then make it bigger. I can't remember where I read it, but there was either a thread here, or a post in a ff.net forum that talks about how the British Wizarding World is an exaggerated view of an old 'Boy's School' (or something) - the prejudice based on family money, family traditions, exclusive society, etc.

But if you make the US into several magical nations (Mayan equivalent, Cowboy equivalent, Cherokee equivalent, etc), and make them into semi-caricatures, you might be heading the right way.

One thing that stuck with me from somewhere was the idea of privately owned towns:

Or hell, make it match the borders of the USA. And MagicalUSA is the utopia that fanon so often shows.
Except the slave trade is still going.
Black people are treated by the white overlords as bad as house-elves in Britain. This is why the white population can live in such luxury - they have slaves trained from birth to use a list of magic only useful for house-keeping/gardening/whatever.

Muggleborns of non-white ethnicity disappear completely. Once detected, their existence is hid with a fidelius, before their existence is branded/tattooed into them by their original secret keeper, covered by a muggle-not-notice charm. And then they are obliviated to four year levels.

Heh, I'd love to see Hermione travel to such a country.

 

If the magical world was known to the US Government the same way the magical world is known to the British government, I always thought there would be some way they'd try to make use of them.

They certainly have no issues pouring heaps of money into development of other military and intelligence initiatives, so I can see the same thing happening with making use of the magical world. The questions would be - is it a positive thing (them trying to recruit from magical communities, take a more active role in their magical citizens) or a negative thing (them trying to identify magical skills young, doing the whole kidnap and brainwash thing).

Of course, the other possibility is just that the US Government has long since been under the control of the magical government there - maybe even from the war of independence.


I think the stereotype on America being a lot more progressive in integrating magical communities and muggle communities (or wizards/witches pretty much living comfortably within the muggle world), as cliched as it is, does have a level of feasibility to it.

I mean, muggleborns might have felt it was their opportunity to move to a new community, and instead of being the lowest rank of the social order, they could become the highest. They may have had more of a tendency to associate and work with their muggle families or counterparts.

 

You would see a lot of different magical creatures in the U.S. wizarding society, like Skin-walkers or Wendigos. I also have a theory -- it's just that, a theory -- that the wand was only introduced to America by European wizarding settlers.

 

See this is why I love the Irish.

 

Bill Clinton is of Irish descent. S'why I love them.

 

To be honest, I would expect Wizarding/Muggle relations to be even worse in the US than here in Europe. I mean, one of the main reasons given for the separation of the two worlds is the persecution of wizards by muggles (no matter how ineffective it is, some would inevitably be caught). In America Christianity is still going pretty damn strong, to the point where a good portion of the country can be labelled fundamentalists. So why exactly would fundamentalist Christians (such as George HW Bush) acknowledge the existence of Wizards and not see them as fundamentally opposed to US interests?

Hell, you could even say that Wizards are even more reclusive in the US than they are over this side of the pond because over here at least the vast, vast majority of people would scoff at the idea of an entire race of magical people living alongside ourselves. The US, not so much.

 

Well, the Salem witch trials get a lot of publicity, but there wasn't really all that much of that going on in the US, relatively speaking.

The fundies would burn more than just witches, given half a chance.

 

Yeah, the Salem witch trials, unless I'm mistaken, were really restricted mostly to Massachusetts. And really, I doubt they were that significant. Early in the books the witch trials were made light of as more or less incompetent and unsuccessful, and it was insinuated that witches and wizards were able to escape and avoid them with little or no real problems. They mentioned that one person who was burned alive a bunch of times because they enjoyed the feel of it through the frame freezing charm or whatever. I wish I remembered what book that was in, probably one or two.

 

I still stand by it. And also because any story where Harry receives a magical education outside of England that isn't Durmstrang in the most remote parts of Norway is a story that sucks balls, and so it stands to reason that the nations hosting Harry's wonderful tour of fail!magic (most notably the United States and Japan) should suck balls too.

Also, there is one other possible exception to my original post. The ICW could be an organization as useless as say, the UN Human Rights Commission, and Dumbledore's supremacy of it some sort of cruel political joke played on the rest of the world akin to North Korea presiding over the nuclear disarmament chairmanship. The ICW certainly plays no effective role in preventing or resisting a psychopath hijacking a major European power, so this is horrifyingly plausible.

 

Chapter one, book three.

 

Thanks Tehan, very kind of you. I think that that section is fairly indicative of the wizarding world's feelings on the subject; something along the lines of bemusement, annoyance, and roll-your-eyes-at-the-incompetence-of-muggles. There really isn't any fear of muggles expressed by anyone throughout the series; most people range from contemptuous to apathetic in their opinions of them.

Vlad: You are SCUM, sir. But not for anything you've posted today. Just a general reminder.

Also, on a more serious note, let's acknowledge that the US was settled by more than just British and Irish people, and that it has a HUGE population built on the immigration of peoples from Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Africa (mostly unwillingly here, of course). I know for a fact that you're aware of this

If there was considerable immigration from areas of the world with less stable economic, political, and social situations, then it stands to reason that the magical world and its citizens could likewise have suffered from hardships that forced immigration (both connected to, and independent of, the problems of the muggle world). I have no problem seeing the American magical world as an amalgamation of Irish, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Asian, and African magical cultures; I could conceive of them all joined together in a looser confederation of magical states to protect their cultural identities, and I could conceive of the American magical world as a reflection of American culture--one consistent cultural identity permeating the entire nation, with groups of recent and not-so-recent immigrants living in their own semi-isolated communities.

 

It could be interesting to see the Americas having a Dresdeneque working of magic - no schools, but apprenticeships and meeting groups. The only authority without any real support from the muggle Government, and dispensing very hardcore 'justice'.

Obviously, it'd need some working around to make the magic fit with the Potterverse system.

 

I wouldn't be uninterested in a story like that. I think that there's a lot of room for experimentation with different societies and magical governments to be had in the US. And for that matter, in the rest of the world. We have no information about any governments in any part of the world, of course.

 

that's not necessarily true. we know the bulgarians have a minister similar to britain's, and that they seem to have a bit of contempt for the british (no english prank)

however, I'll agree we know very little about the rest of the magical world. bulgaria is one magical ministry, and to be completely honest, unless they represent all slavic nations, and not russia, then they are small fish ina big pond.

we can infer that the slavic nations are more blood prejudiced because of durmstrang's propensity towards the dark arts, but that doesn't quite confirm whether they go dark, or just have another, more dangerous skillset than their british counterparts.