Edit: nevermind.

 

But guns!1! Bullets are fast!!!1

 

Yeah!1! And what about an H-Bomb, could Harry survive it????

But seriously, this kind of thread will keep appearing as long as there is a HP fandom, people have the urge to rationalize stuff, and Magic is a very tempting target for that. It's kind of new for me to participate in them so I keep posting, but if they are so frequent I can see why some would get fed up with it, new arguments are probably hard to appear due to the subject's nature.

 

Care to counteract any of my other points? Escaping the radiation once the shield charm is down? How are you able to breathe in a shield charm if it protects from everything outside it?

Edit: But in all fairness, I believe this thread should be locked because it's really just "Muggles vs Wizards".

 

Well, if you work on the assumption that the Shield Charm works conceptually/thematically, then you can just as easily assume that the concept of protection also involves the idea of not suffocating yourself.

 

I'll just go ahead and /barn the bolded part.

The problem here is that the mind kind of shies away from the absurdity of a wizard living on the sun, or inside a vat of acid, or a Shield Charm protecting you from Ground Zero. Even if yes, if you accept the conceptual / symbolic nature of magic as presented by JKR, you need to admit that's what would happen if you tried to put those things together. But as Sesc pointed out, you shouldn't.

The reason is that they don't really exist in the same world.

I mean, they do. HP takes place on Earth. But JKR's "world" just doesn't include nuclear bombs or sniper rifles. That's why putting the two of them together generates all this discussion - there's a disconnect there. You can Spacebattles the whole concept ad infinitum if you want, but if you do you're missing the fundamental point that thematically, narratively, aesthetically, these things are not supposed to go together.

If you're in love with the idea of Harry and Ron getting Mr. Weasley to enchant a Chieftain FV4201 tank and using it to shell Malfoy Manor, more power to you, but that idea will just never work, conceptually, outside of a crack fic. It might work in a different fandom - from what I understand, Dresden Files would maaaaaaybe work? - but it won't work in HP.

Magic in HP only works in term of Suspension of Disbelief because JKR never tries to apply it to edge cases. It's not D&D; you don't get any points for gaming the system.

 

On a more general note, if I might take a moment to type up my thoughts on magical limits so that I can just quote it the next time we have this debate:

I'm all in favour of limits on magic, because if there aren't any then you get shit stories where the characters get into a sticky situation and just click their fingers and resolve it because magic. The limits don't necessarily have to be on magic itself though. The limitations on HP magic include: can only be cast through a wand*; magic is simple, not easy; magic cannot bring back the dead in any meaningful way (which is of course a limitation on magic itself); magic can be trumped by other magic.

Why is it that the Shield Charm can protect against anything other than the Killing Curse? Because the Killing Curse is the concept of death given (somewhat) physical form, and you cannot stop death (To quote Death himself, in Terry Pratchett's Mort, "I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD.")

Can a Shield Charm protect you against a nuclear explosion? Yes. The limitation comes in when you realise that you're stood at ground zero, and most wizards don't have the skill to combine magic in such a way as to Apparate out of there while still holding the Shield up. Lower the Shield to leave, and you get radiation poisoning, which might not necessarily be fatal to a wizard, but certainly isn't fun.

Could a wizard live in the sun using a Shield Charm? Yes. But: A) Why the fuck would you want to? The nuclear explosion is a reasonable enough question, I suppose, but seriously, where the fuck does this even come from? B) You would need to keep the Charm up at all times. Literally, forever. Can you keep it going while you're asleep? Can you commit to living the rest of your life effectively one-handed since your other hand is going to be occupied with holding your wand forever? How are you going to build any kind of life for yourself when you're constantly thinking about the Shield? (I realise as I type this that the question has been phrased both as living in the sun and surviving falling into the sun; if the latter, then obviously some of this doesn't apply, but you come back to the issue of getting out of there while still keeping the Shield up that you have with the nuclear explosion)

*Leaving aside potions, divination etc, and the Early Installment Weirdness of PS.

 

And the fact that those particular wizards did nothing at all to help their fellow man? Or that they had the foresight to put up a protego in the first place.

But that's off topic. You can't just wave aside the no limits fallacy argument. Also, once you stop the shield charm, you'll still be prey to the radiation around the area.

As for not appearing in any HP fic, a thing such as crossovers do exist.

But again, I still believe that this thread shouls be locked, it's straying too close to muggles vs wizards.

 

Crossovers are still HP fics.

See, if you have any thematic sense at all the mere thought of trying to test Protego against a nuke or the sun or microwaves or whatever should make you feel sort of queasy inside simply because of how drastically un-Harry Potter that concept is. It's tone deaf to the entire series.

It's why all the "Muggle world discovers the Wizarding world" stories or the "Wizards use Muggle technology" ones are complete and utter shite, because within JK Rowling's universe for Harry Potter, the Wizarding World and the Muggle world don't mix. Ever. When Wizards and Muggles interact the Muggles are quaint and almost slightly primitive, their technology is regarded as rather silly and vaguely amusing in the same way we might look at children's Lego sets, and the possibility of Muggles being some sort of threat to Wizards en masse is laughable.

When you try and sit down the figure out how many nukes a wizard could survive or why wizards haven't made Protego-powered spaceships or wand sniper rifles you're being completely and utterly tone-deaf to the entire Harry Potter series. That's why, as Newcomb and Sesc mention, none of these things should appear in a Harry Potter story or fic.

Yeah, I can. I do it with maaaaaaaagic.

Harry Potter magic doesn't work mechanically, as you keep trying to shackle it with. It works thematically. Things happen independent of the force involved or the amount of energy being used or the potential chemical reactions.

The Killing Curse can kill anything that lives unless interfered with magic or magic resistance like dragons, yet I don't see any argument against that. It kills flies and spiders in the exact same manner as humans and elephants and whales and tardigrades (which, incidentally, shouldn't be included in a HP fic). Because it has no limits. No non-magical limits, at least. Barring magical resistance, it just kills.

 

Except, in certain crossovers, a situation may arise in which Harry has to defend against a nuke or somehting similar. Un-Harry Potter? Come on, how many shows change the tone of the Harry Potter series to a style more reminiscent to that of Game of THrones or a more gritty world.

As for what you said about testing Protego against a nuke, that's the whole reason this thread exits! Yes, it shouldn't appear in a Harry Potter story but I am answering the question posed!

 

Harry Potter gets quite gritty as it is, and you'll find that you can still change a lot of aspects of the story while retaining the tones. It's when you do things that are flat out alien to the series (like heavy, realistic real-world interaction between the Wizarding world and the Muggle one) that the tone breaks down.

You can change quite a lot of the atmosphere without creating tonal dissonance. Much darker or lighter fics than canon can be written without breaking from the general tone of the series, but the minute you start getting assault rifles firing stunners or people nuking Hogwarts you're not really writing a Harry Potter fic anymore, except superficially.

Some perfectly good and quality fics are utterly removed from the source material, but they're extremely rare and are generally just the work of an incredibly good author rather than any good ideas or thematic works. They are all, however, not real HP fics. They may use the characters and even attempt to use the world and magic system to some degree but when you leave the tone of the series that far behind you really aren't writing Harry Potter fanfiction any more.

cough Wastelands of Time cough

 

I want to point out that you could just vanish the motherfucking nuke before it hits.

 

Or just transfigure that shit into fireworks.

/Wand and Shield

 

Ok, so I don't usually enter these threads. But a lot of people are saying that a shield charm protects the user. And they seem to imply that it's against everything. (Except AK obviously)

So how is the shield charm not a be all end all for everything? What are it's limitations? Surely not just knowing when to cast it.

 

There's always the competence issue. After all, according the canon the average adult wizard can't cast a decent shield charm.