An animation of this story was released in Pottermore.

 

Wands reacting badly to Muggles has been book canon since Tales of Beedle the Bard.

 

Exactly. See, she's white, and unless she's writing about white mythological thingies then obviously it's because racism. At least I think she's white... that may just be me being racist. Maybe she's like 1/32 Apache or something. It should be perfectly okay in that respect.

Maybe the AI-SJWs didn't do a thorough family tree on her. She could totally be full-blooded Apache, but some strange genetic disorder makes her look white and sound British. :awesome

 

There are always going to be people who complain about appropriating culture. I am absolutely certian that if she'd properly researched Native American legend's and saga's, that she could have written a very respectable story. A wasted opportunity, if you want my opinion.

 

Emphasis mine.

Pfft. When an SJW raises a stink about appropriation of a culture (as if that's a thing), it's rarely ever their own culture they're talking about; it's them sticking their nose in someone else's business and saying, "What you're doing has nothing to do with me, and it's not my own culture you're (supposedly) treading upon, but I still think it's my sworn duty to say something on their behalf..."

Ugh. What annoying little shits.

--

Anyway, I think a large part of what annoys me about this new information (including Ilvermorny and anything else since DH was published) is that JK is too far up her own (world's) ass.

Why did it have to be a Gaunt that founded the school?

I don't have a problem with this stuff being somewhat interconnected with her older material, but the Gaunts are center stage in the back story of the Harry Potter series. Why not give the spotlight to someone else for a change? It could have been worse, sure -Ilvermorny could have been founded by a fucking Weasley- but why not someone barely mentioned in Harry Potter?

Why not a MacDougal or a Davis? Why not a Greengrass, Clearwater, or even a friggin' Parkinson? How about the Wizarding half of Dean Thomas's family?

Even a descendant of Gryffindor or Hufflepuff would have been preferable, given that their families got less page time than Slytherin and even Ravenclaw.

The inclusion of the Boots isn't so bad, though.

I'm almost surprised she didn't make the new characters Evans, Weasley, or Prewett family members, since she seems to have a need to make the Weasleys part of everything good or noteworthy in the entirety of the Wizarding World.

Out of the relatively small number of magical creatures that are canon to HP, two of them are now huge, nearly-unkillable, panther-like, creatures.

The Thunderbird is a no-brainer as a mascot. The others, not so much... The Jackalopes they were putting in their wands would have been better than the puckwudgie* (I think she just wanted a name at least as ridiculous as Hufflepuff) and Horned Serpent.

So Isolt can understand the horned serpent because she's a parselmouth, because she's a descendant of the Gaunts, who are descendants of Slytherin... except that makes no sense because it also says she couldn't reactivate the Slytherin wand because she could not speak parseltongue, so she couldn't be a parselmouth, so how the fuck could she understand the horned serpent in the first place and I've gone cross-eyed.

And I guess ALL magical snakes have horns, now? Am I forgetting the basilisk's horns being mentioned, or was this another retroactive ass-pull on her/her collaborators' part?

Wands are now inherently imbued with violent anti-muggle countermeasures as a matter of course. On a related note, wizards and witches are especially wary of pat-downs at the airport (I'm including Beedle in post-DH material, BTW).

Wands can be put to sleep, FML. :facepalm

And sleeping spells can apparently be cast at quite extensive distances, without line of sight to your targets, as long as you know their names.

And Slytherin's wand must have phenomenal hearing.

Using twin wand cores against a common target increases their efficacy by an order of magnitude. Well, I guess that's as good an excuse as any for Harry to keep Voldemort's wand around... and fight 'wands akimbo' style.

And once again we see a case of the adults knowing that there was someone out there who might very well be looking to murder their children, and they don't bother warning them. Chadwick and Webster only knew about the murderous aunt who might seek revenge because they'd secretly overheard some shit.

Always a classy move, adults. Very protect. Much safe.
(I'm ruling right now that there's a magic school that is just an internet correspondence course, and one of the houses is Doge House. I think you can guess one of the others.)

So the sounds of their adopted children shouting for help and fighting for their lives couldn't rouse the parents, but the cries of their actual, blood-related, daughters did?

Real children are always better than adopted ones: Confirmed for CANON. :awesome


Things I'm either neutral on or find interesting...

It may not require magic at all to make a wand. Here we have a muggle carving the wand, and either he or the witch shoving a sliver of a magical creature into it, and that's it. No mention of any spells or anything, and it's not like she knew anything about wand-making, so if she used any magic at all, it's not as if it was some specialized wand-crafting spell.

And apparently it turned out to be a really good wand, too.

A story where Harry, indie or otherwise, just up and makes a new wand for himself just got that much more plausible.

Being twins is no guarantee you'll both be able to do magic. So not only do you have to put up with the usual bullshit that can be bad for twins, you also may be stuck being a squib while your sibling can do magic. What a friggin' ripoff.


*You just know the other students call them "pack-fudgies."

 

I know i am the minority here, but i'm ok with all the new info. I've always believed that magic has no limits and the ones that do exist is simply because Witches and Wizards haven't found a way around it yet and its all just a matter of time until they make a new discovery which will allow them to create a legendary item that can make good food, based on the concepts of seed, earth and life, it could be some sort of box with magical earth and self refilling water that makes everything grow much faster, idk. Although i admit that its a bit weird now, because anything seems possible and reasonable for anyone that has a bit of creativity.

 

Is JKR trying to outdo George Lucas?

 

I don't know why, but this part really got me.

When you expand your house enough times, it becomes castle. Weasleys are like one, max. two expansions from that.

 

Disappointed that you aren't chosen for Thunderbird house by the statues eyes lighting up and it squawking "F.A.B!" at you.

 

Once again I'm late to the party.:facepalm I got sorted into Thunderbird (Which sounds a lot like Gryffindor btw).

The only thing I found interesting was the blurb about the founder of Ilvermorny being adopted by the Gaunt family. Other than that I hope Fantastic Beasts and where to find them is better than this and Cursed child.

Also this is why we should be grateful to Slytherin.

 

Yeah, probably never gonna read this, much in the same way I've never felt the urge to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special.

 

You aren't missing much. It read like a 3/5 fanfiction.

 

I know... I'm just in denial that Rowling can write this bad.

 

I just feel that she could have done so much more with Ilvermorny. The story of the founding itself was fine, the houses are fine, everything is just... fine. It doesn't feel magical or exciting or particularly interesting. She could have done literally anything she wanted and instead it just seems dull.

I think it's maybe because we don't actually get much information about the school itself? We find out about the sorting (which I thought was one of the more interesting and unique parts) and she gives us a few more details here and there, but it feels like she wrote a whole lot of words but didn't really give us anything of substance. Maybe it'll seem better when Fantastic Beasts is out? I don't know, but maybe.

 

I don't think there's anything really wrong with this. Casting a spell without line of sight (after Snape said in ootp that space and time matter in magic) is a bit shitty, but I found the story entertaining enough. Bit disappointed by wandcrafting apparently being that easy.

 

Either Ollivander is so amazingly, incomparably, and unquestionably skilled at wandcrafting that his wands are indisputably the best and therefore no one else in the U.K. even bothers making them, no matter how uncomplicated the process is... oooor British wizards really are so lazy that they just never bother trying to make their own.

You'd think for sure that if it were simple a process, the Weasley twins would have given it a shot before they even went to school.

Death eaters and other criminals would be making "burner" wands that they could commit crimes with and then simply destroy afterward.

Honestly, I don't care if crafting a wand is easy, but I do care about the HP world having internal consistency. If making a wand is that simple, a lot of things in the book would have been different.

Now, I will grant you, the main difficulty would probably not be the actual production of the wand, but of actually having that wand be a match for you. In that case, it's a lot easier to go to a craftsman who has a lot of them on hand, as that's his profession, and find your match among their stock. Otherwise, you're stuck crafting wand after wand until you find a superlative match.

But that still begs the question of why there aren't one or two more of said craftsmen in the U.K..

Of course, it could just be brand recognition. Purebloods like the prestige that comes with having been established since fire was the new novelty product, and nobody can touch Ollivanders on that front. And since that's where the highfalutin folks get their wands, that's where everyone else goes, too.

With the community as small as it is, that would make it hard for anyone else to compete in the market of legal wand production.

Ollivanders: "We're the best you can get, because we're all you can get."

 

There's plenty on magic in the series that doesn't seem to rely on space and time - I highly doubt the Taboo, for example, was cast by someone flying a broom high enough to see the whole UK.