And as I said in my post, wizard hardiness is a potential explanation for why we don’t see guns, and I agree that there’s canon support for it. In fact, it’s one of my favorite tropes.
But even so, the scene you reference demonstrates that wizards are hurt by mundane damage. If Harry got so much as a scratch from a bludger going only 150mph, then an a-bomb would definitely kill him.

But unloading a clip into Voldie is exactly the kind of small minded BS that pisses me off, doubly so since it gives this trope such a bad rap.

Think bigger, like the 30mm A-10 autocannon (if you’re not familiar, it shreds main battle tanks) modified to be man or vehicle portable/manageable, and even then it doesn’t break so much as a protego unless the bullets are magical themselves (I.e. rune inscribed). Still useful in a fight though, because the moment magic (i.e. a wizard) breaks the magical protection (someone like Voldie would obviously have a great deal more of this than your standard death eater), the target is mist (or at least severely injured, depending on how far you want to take the whole wizard hardiness thing).

 

Of course he had magical protection. A Shield Charm would suffice.

 

Mate there's a ton of other settings where you can engage on gun porn to your heart's content. Why take it to a fantasy magical setting like HP?

What do guns add to a story about wizards? Aren't you really just trying to write a story about guns? Then write that. You don't have to try to make HP fit that shape.

 

Right, so then this is perfectly consistent with the world I have in mind. Like I said, only magic defeats magic.

 

How to deal with autocannon
1) Protego
2) Impedimenta
3) Evanesco

Why are you trying to shove guns into the Potterverse? Just write original fiction.

 

Yes, you've nicely demonstrated how unsupported weapons can easily be dealt with by a wizard (although I would quibble that you can't hold a protego and cast other spells at the same time, so you really need two wizards to deal with my one squib).

But I don't think you understand how much their absence is a gaping plot hole to me. Hagrid carries a crossbow when he enters the forbidden forest. What is a crossbow going to do to something that can harm one of these hardy wizards that a more modern weapon wouldn't do better? It's hard but possible to come up with a satisfactory answer to that. What's much harder though is to give a satisfactory answer to that which also explains why they wouldn't be there in other contexts not seen in canon. Again, Bellatrix carries, trains with, and throws a knife. Why a knife instead of a gun? Because she's pureblood and muggle ich; ok, but why doesn't Moody? Maybe he does, we just don't see it because he's never disarmed.

It's not that I'm trying to shove guns in, it's that in my mind they're trying very hard to come in on their own, and I'd like to find a way to let that happen rather than continuing to come up with weak excuses for why they can't, especially when Harry needs a power up anyway. And magic is a huge part of this, there are tons of reasons you can't put a 30mm autocannon in a fanfic without magic, or even with a different magic system. But the magic system in HP makes it almost literally child's play to do so, which is why it feels like such a gaping plot hole.

 

It's not a plothole. It's a stylistic choice of the author. There aren't guns in Potterverse for the same reason why 40K Space Marines use metal chainsaw swords instead of laser swords, when I'm sure they have the tech and lasers would be much better at slicing aliens than chainsaws. The reason is... because that's the aesthetic of the fictional universe.

Potterverse world has a whimsical urban fantasy vibe, that's why the school is in a fucking castle where students routinely freeze their asses off in winter when clearly wizards have the capability to heat a room. Harry doesn't carry a Glock with rune-inscribed bullets because it would be a thematic clash.

This is just a different version of the argument about why Dumbledore allowed Snape to keep teaching at Hogwarts when Snape is a petty, abusive incel who bullies a kid because his dead mom wouldn't date him. The reason is that the story has fairytale elements and a scary, evil fugly sorcerer who comes after children is a very fairytale trope. Adults are useless in the first several books because the first several books are children's literature. JKR's decision to transition the series from children's books to YA was a fucking genius move, hence the books getting more mature as the series goes on and suddenly the ugly evil scary wizard Snape gains depth and is redeemed into anti-hero.

But the whimsical fantasy worldbuilding never went away. There are no guns because they wouldn't fit. Snape was allowed to teach at Hogwarts because that trope fits. Applying magitech/magitek (however you want to spell it) to magical duels (which is what you're doing with your enchanted gatling gun or whatever the fuck) is the same mistake as applying real world standards of teacher conduct to Snape.

You don't understand this basic fact about this universe. Around here, we call this "thinking like a muggle" and it only leads to
1) shitfics (your idea belongs here)
2) stuff like everything Marquis Black has written (it's a link to a FFN profile page)

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed his fic "Emperor" for what it is, but I recognize that it used HP as a launching platform to get an audience and would have been a much better story as original fiction.

You're focused on guns because you like guns but I have yet to see you moan about why wizards don't use pens. The closest anyone has come to successfully including guns in a Harry Potter fic is @Swimdraconian's Circular Reasoning and as far I remember, the guns haven't shown up since very early in the story, because Swim understands that they don't really fit into the Harry Potter universe. You don't.

 

Post a story to WBA. This thread will yield nothing else useful. You haven't listened to anything anyone has said.

 

So you have a good point here and it's what I meant when I said "for thematic reasons" earlier; it's also what I directly addressed when I said the real world reason was because "Rowling found the idea of a separate wizarding world enchanting and didn’t give much thought to how the competitive space of ideas would force innovation". Sure, I could have also added the elements you pointed out about the kind of story she was writing and the intended audience as well, but that seemed excessive.

I do appreciate you calling this out specifically though, because it helps me differentiate the arguments based on plausibility, general writing concepts, and thematic adherence. Your objections previously were, on the face of them, based in plausibility, so I really appreciate you more explicitly moving your objection to thematic grounds.

In my opinion, the whole point of writing fanfiction is that we can move past some of those elements and have fun with the world she created without being bound to the same stylistic elements. If pens instead of quills had the same disruptive power that military grade hardware had to a manpower scarce combat environment, you can bet that I would want to see a fic that explored that disruption as well.

Ultimately, I am writing this fic for me, so I'm ok with violating the original style if it means I can adopt an existing story and framework to write into a space that I enjoy exploring. My preference would be to do that in a way that complies with good writing style and doesn't feel more campy than is necessary so that other people might enjoy my idea as well. "What if we applied the HP magic system to military hardware, what could we do with that?" is a fun idea to me, and I want to explore it. I have some ideas about how to do it in a manner that I really don't think anyone has ever done so that it doesn't feel like I've violated canon, objections are addressed without breaking the flow of the story, and the transition feels natural. Who knows? Maybe I'll pull it off and future forum posts on this topic will point to my fic as having the elements that must be present for a departure like this.

If you'd like to help me figure out how to do that in a way that doesn't make everyone but me cringe, then great! I'd love to have that discussion. If you just want to sit there and insist that fanfiction based on a magical world that is set in present day Britain and contains a magical steam train, a magical car, and a magical flying motorcycle can't have an rpg*, regardless of the work I might do to make the introduction reasonable, then we probably need to part ways on this discussion.

*EDIT: the original version of this said "so much as a cannon" because I was thinking with regards to a system that would permit the previous but prohibit gunpowder. I recognized, however, that an 1800s cannon would fit much better thematically and could therefore be much more acceptable. Rather than going down the fruitless rabbit hole of "but why can't we just improve the cannon some?", I changed it to "rpg" to skip that argument.

 

I dunno, if he wants to write about guns, let him write about guns. Maybe he'll do it well and wow all of us and make us change our mind. Haven't seen it done well yet, but doesn't mean it can't be.

But yeah, at this point goose I think you've thought through this well enough. I don't think you're gonna get anyone to write it for you, so you gotta figure out whether you're gonna write it yourself or not.

I've no doubt many here would read and comment on it.

 

Every object in the universe has a binary predicate associated with it, like a tag. That predicate is whether the object is Muggleish or not.

Objects with the Muggleish predicate are prone to fail around magic and/or be particularly ineffective against it and/or take poorly to enchantment.

Examples of Muggleish objects are pigs, Dursleys, guns, radar, computers.

Examples of objects that are not Muggleish include watches, crossbows, knives, bows, and classic cars.

This is an objective property which is innate to the objects. It is not the product of perception or opinion. It’s just a part of the universe, like whether something counts as “food” for the purposes of Gamp’s law.

A crossbow is a more effective weapon against magical things than a gun would be because it is a more inherently fantastical object than guns are. While not literally enchanted, there is some level of the fantastic to it. Guns are too embedded within the paradigm of modernity and science to have power against wizards.

 

You’ve lost me. I always thought the distinction about whether tech works near magic was about a mechanical vs electrical divide. A combustion engine is fine, but landline telephone will break.

I really don’t get why classic cars wouldn’t be tagged as muggleish under your understanding of magic corrupting tech. Seems like a rather convenient way to write in cool magic sports cars.

I’ve always thought guns would work around wizards, but they wouldn’t harm them, so using them is a dumb idea.

 

There's a few bits of canon to reference here.

Hermione in GOF

Note that electricity is only one item on the list - an example of things which fail around magic, not the definition of that category.

The definition of the category is "substitutes for magic Muggles use". I.e. objects which are Muggleish.

WizardingWorld.com - Pure-blood

From this we take that certain things are especially unmagical, to the point that it is more difficult to enchant them as compared to other objects.

Other bits and pieces

Mr Weasley and the Ministry have enchanted cars.

Synthesis

So far so canon. The novel step I take is to synthesise the above observations into a single phenomena. Certain things are unmagical, and this is the same category of things as Muggleish objects which fail around magic.

As regards classic cars, from the fact that we have seen them enchanted, they are clearly not in this category. Which is not entirely unreasonable. Classic cars are not really functional. They are owned for their aesthetic properties. They are not substitutes for magic because they are not primarily functional objects. They don't replace magical transportation, they are simply a way you can choose to transport yourself if you feel like travelling in style.

 

It's all about the setting and tone. The canon HP setting is all about wizards vs wizards in a mostly rural fantasy magical world. That setting doesn't need guns.

Now, if you write a story about a combined arms squib/muggleborn company paving way for the Allied offensive in France through magical traps and ambushes laid by Grindelwalds goons, the setting is different.

Whether something is "canonically correct" or not is completely nonsensical wank. The canon is fucked up beyond all reason, everything goes. The overall aestethic is all that matters, and that's mostly a question of taste.

 

I agree it's about setting and tone, but I think by having a conceptual magic system, the themes are in fact incorporated directly into the setting. E.g. Harry's plot armour isn't just a meta observation we have from the outside. He literally has plot armour because the HP world is similar to Narnia in that magic itself prefers good over evil and will ensure it wins. Failing to understand that was Voldemort's greatest error. He was a STEMlord cynical atheist living in a fundamentally anthropocentric universe with an objective morality.

 

Harry has plot armour bc he’s the protagonist. This really elaborate explanation for it seems unnecessary.

 

The point is that "plot armour" is normally a criticism of bad writing, in which a protagonist survives in situations where, according to the rules of the world they inhabit, they should not survive.

But in HP, his survival is part of the rules of the universe. He survives because the rules of the universe prefer him to Voldemort. It's not an error of writing, it is part of the worldbuilding.

 

I like this explanation, it's probably one of the best attempts I've seen to address the issue with in-universe logic. It's very similar to what I meant when I proposed "magic messes with precision machinery in inconsistent ways; the more something is a product of precision crafting, the more likely it is to malfunction in the presence of magic (higher levels of magic exacerbate this issue)" as a possible explanation. One idea I had to deal with this system was that the Swiss had discovered a closely guarded branch of magic by which "mugglish" items could retain their function (within limits) in the presence of magic. I'm now worried this is too campy, and favoring another idea where the level of precision permissible in an environment is highly dependent on the ambient magical readings.

I'm curious as to where you got the idea that the cars in canon were antiques though. I feel like it's a bit of a stretch to say that the "old fashioned" translates to "not practically usable antique" rather than "wizards are out of touch and out of date", but @arkkitehti is correct about the state of canon, so it's totally reasonable to stretch some things a little to get something consistent to fit. Do you figure the motorbike was an antique too?

If you don't mind, I'd like to pull on this thread a little with you. What do you figure the range of this effect to be, and how magical do you suppose the environment has to be for it to prevail? If my 30mm rounds were launched from a platform a mile away (totally normal combat range for this platform) from the target and are ballistic from there, what do you expect the effect of magic to be as it gets within 100m? 20m? 1m? (bear in mind that the projectile might simply be a slug of depleted uranium but would be traveling >2x the speed of sound)
I'm not trying to prove you wrong with this question, just curious as to what you expect from such an event under your system.

This is a good point, and I might be able to work from this. My idea already changes the setting pretty significantly because instead of some domestic skirmishes and the defense of Hogwarts by teachers and students in 1998 or so, we might be seeing a team of trained militants carrying out deliberate raids against established government targets something like five years after Voldie's victory. I'm not even set on setting this in Britain. I could let Voldie's ambitions carry him to invading France and set it there. Do you have any thoughts as to what kind of setting changes here might make it fit better?


Thanks again for the feedback, I think you guys are right that I've probably exhausted the usefulness of forum and would spend further time better on actually writing rather than discussing this here at length. So consider it acknowledged that further replies are probably more because I enjoy discussing this than because I feel like it's the most efficient way to get my story.

 

I don't attribute this to good vs evil. I like to take the qualities of wizards as magical phenomena. Such as when Harry is brave, he isn't just acting despite fear, instead he's performing a magical act. The greater the act of bravery, the greater the act of magic. What is attributed to plot armor, or luck, is the results of subtler magic. The like of which Voldemort canonically dismisses. The support is Dumbledore's explanation of love, but I've never thought it should stop with matters of the heart.

A force of magic so powerful even a muggle can assist. Petunia doesn't love Harry, she loves her sister and that's enough.

These traits of Harry, his bravery and nobility of spirit. His unconditional love. His fierce desire to live, yet willingness to die for others, even his orneriness and rule breaking; it all speaks to the character of Harry Potter. Everything that makes him great is an ingredient in his success.

It's the worst sort of fanfiction that takes away everything that makes Harry great. They make him ruthless and academic and then act as if they've improved him as a wizard.

 

Wouldn't you dislike slash fanfiction in Harry Potter?

Many fans dislike slash in Harry Potter fanfiction because Harry is portrayed as heterosexual in the canon. Deviating from canon here clearly breaks their Suspension of Disbelief (SOD) even without violating the setting.

I agree with your example here, but it works because it's logical and avoids plot holes.

Now, I'm not saying setting doesn't matter at all. It does, but it's so easy to change that setting isn't the main issue with adding guns to Harry Potter fanfiction.

For example, let's take "Wand and Shield by Roarian." Harry in the Marvel universe completely changes the setting. But people would have rejected the story if Harry even tried to learn muggle firearms. This is because it challenges the unspoken assumption of magic's superiority that allows the original story to make sense.

However, if you allow the assumption of muggle weapons' uselessness to go unchallenged, not using magic as a weapon can work in fanfiction.

Don't agree? This fanfiction, "Effloresco Secundus" in the DLP library, features Hermione reincarnated in the Naruto world with barely any magic. Yet, it's clearly well-liked. You could say it's because the setting has changed, but then wasn't it changed for "Wand and Shield" too? Yet, Harry using muggle weapons in that fic would have caused an uproar.

My main point is that canon compliance has a lot to do with why you shouldn't add guns. As in, if an author suddenly makes Harry powerful after the fifth year when he was mediocre before, it breaks SOD. Similarly, if Dumbledore suddenly tries to steal Harry's funds after gifting him the invisibility cloak, it breaks SOD. Likewise, if Harry doesn't forgive Ron in the fifth year when he did in canon, it breaks SOD. Finally, when guns are used against Voldemort when no muggle-born bothered trying before, it breaks SOD.

If anyone has a counter-example that disproves this and shows why I'm wrong, please mention it. I would hate for preexisting bias to cloud my judgment on writing.