This is something that I was thinking of while reading Alexandra Potter by Taure and Harry Potter and the Boy who Lived by Santi.

Both of those fics, along with many many other show Harry or fem!Harry as being exceptionally bright and significantly better than their piers.

But at times it seems that they, along with other who try to show a naturally gifted prodigy, hedge their bets a bit to much.

When I think of a true, once in a generation prodigy, I think of someone like Mozart, who obviously did work hard, but he was already at and beyond adult level by a very young age. From the bits I know of him he could for the most part, just play. He didnt have a progression from shitty to okay. to good, to great, to amazing. Once he had the basics explained to him, he had it, the rest was just polishing the gold trophy.

It would seem to be the same as just handing Harry a wand, teaching him a crash course in latin and interpretive dance and having him pass his NEWTS.

People often show him reading books on magical theory, and reading dozens of books and studying to all hours to slowly improve his talents (much faster than his classmates but slow when you see the end result being Dumbledore or Riddle).

It would almost seem that a natural prodigy should pick up a single book on magical theory, say "Ah right got it" and then have such a natural fundamental grasp of it they dont really need to read a lot more, they just do. Maybe have a conversation with someone in the top of their field to bounce ideas off but for the most part run free.

On the other hand a few fics I have seen do this come off as really shitty super!Harry fics.

So is their a good way to show a natural grasp of magic that doesnt need the tedious years of study with out it coming off as a Gary Stu?

 

Depends on the depiction of magic, I suppose. In both my fic and Santi's fic, success in magic is a primarily academic matter, as complex as modern developed sciences. The main thing involved in being a powerful wizard is one's mind. So the analogy would be with prodigies in physics, or maybe engineering.

These prodigies do have to go through previous knowledge. The don't re-discover all of physics on their own in a few years while they're children. They learn what already exists at an accelerated pace, often with a deeper than normal understanding, and then go on to make their contributions to the field.

 

There isnt anything more boring in Harry Potter fanfiction then learning about Harry studying. Even Rowling never felt the need to punish us with that.

The best way to handle Harry as a prodigy is to skip over most of that work, or only show the teacher/student interactions when Harry is being taught them, or the direct results of that work. Thats whats essential.

Harry as a prodigy isnt a story, the results are.

 

What about the children who get to collage by the age of 12 and PhDs by by 19. Rare but not unheard of. They would of had to learn everything. But they can just read something once and just get it. They don't need to practice at it really. Advanced concepts are the same as 2 + 2 for us.

 

Hmm the difference between a "Mozartian" prodigy and say a Physics or in this case a Wizarding prodigy I believe lies in the area of expertise. I'm no music expert but I say it's easy for a music prodigy to go from good to mindblowing mainly because underneath it all, music has simple, basic rules that can be quickly picked up on and then recombined to make amazing music.

The same is not so for magic/physics, etc because the laws are far too many, the branches and subsets far too diverse, the theories and principles far too innumerable to be picked up in a short space of time. Even considering just a single branch of magic, the knowledge there in to be acquired is too much for a prodigy to show near-overnight progress.

Thankfully Taure and Santi both understand this and it shows in their fics. I do not want to read about an instant!genius Harry Potter. If he was learning music though it would be acceptable for him to show very quick progress. Of course my knowledge of music is rudimentary at best so everything I've said so far could be wrong.

 

The problem here is that we know that Harry is not a genius in canon, and generally as fanfic readers we need to be persuaded to buy any change from canon. Arbitrarily making Harry a genius with no reasoning, without seeing the hard work it took to get there and the gradual process of improvement, feels like a stipulated "by the way, in this fic Harry is a genius" rather than the natural character development it should be.

Insta!Genius is Gary Stu land. The only way to avoid Gary Stu is to show that it's not easy to read that point and that it takes a fuckton of work.

 

As somebody who knows a bunch of people like that, and almost being one of them, trust me when I say it isn't that easy. You still have to put in a ton of hours to get results. You just get a lot more value out of your time.

You learn things faster, understand ideas better, and are capable of better abstraction and reasoning. But you still have to practice. You can't just read a textbook in physics and remeber it, you have to do every single damn problem (and then go online and do a few more).

 

I've met several of these wunderkinds and while they are impressive, you realize that they often don't have the deepest understanding of the subjects they've purportedly mastered. There's a price to be paid for radical acceleration.

I don't have the energy to risk another DLP shitstorm by talking about my own experience, so imagine an anecdote [here] that is topical and insightful. Good. Got that out of the way.

Natural ability only takes you so far and I think it's far, far overrated, particularly in fictional portrayals of genius. I can point to plenty of IQ 150+ people who coast on ability and then fold at the first real challenges they face, never amounting to anything near their potential. These are people who certainly wouldn't be considered prodigies later in life, when the novelty of their being a child knowing adult things has worn off.

For all the Jonesing about the guy's talents, and he was the greatest of all time, Mozart produced a metric fuckton of subpar, knock-off work, the musical equivalent of fanfiction, early in his life before he finally got to the point where he made the sublime look easy. Despite the Amadeus film's portrayal, the guy totally worked his ass off, probably worked harder than any musician and composer in history. There is no true prodigy without effort commensurate with ability, and natural ability is maybe 30% of greatness; 70% is hard work, made more effective by ability.

True prodigies take chances and don't fear failure; they revel in it. They push the envelope to see what they can do, which means they fall off the cliff sometimes. They accept that they will fail, that they will lose face before their peers, but play the long game, recognizing that today's misery is the foundation for tomorrow's success.

 

I personally find prodigy!harry too boring, especially in santi's fic where every other character either gushes over him, or hates him. Most stories get get on just fine without it, and would be better off with natural progression, rather than fantastical author heavyhandedness.

 

Hm...I think of 'prodigy' and 'genius' as two very distinct things. A prodigy has an exceptional talent in something. They pick things up at an accelerated pace, but that's it. They don't get a sudden, deeper understanding of the universe from intelligence alone.

Genius emerges when they ask questions about what they know. When they realize that there are gaps in their understanding, and then they try to reconcile those gaps and find those answers. That takes years of work and effort and calculation. And when they have accomplished or created what they set out to do...it becomes just another stepping stone towards the next question.

That's a bit cheesy. Essentially, it takes both curiosity and hard work to become a leader of a field.

 

Prodigies, as we seem to be referring to them here, are youth who learn faster and earlier than others. Geniuses are people who do with knowledge what others cannot.

The Marauders were clearly prodigies in that they learned the Animagus transformation at a young age, but other than their creation of the Marauder's Map there is little indication that they were geniuses. The Weasley Twins, by contrast, could be considered prank geniuses, using their knowledge in ways that others simply never had, yet they were not portrayed in canon as being prodigious.

I think Taure's point that it depends on how the author treats magic really hits the nail on the head. In fics where magical power is a matter of deeply understanding magic/nature, there's a definite need to give readers a view of the complexity of knowledge that the prodigy/genius is achieving.

But there's another kind of knowledge, procedural or imperative knowledge, that is more akin to the genius of Mozart or Michael Jordan. That sort of ability to understand instinctively how to perform a feat with ease that others could only possibly replicate with years of practice is not really something you can demonstrate by showing a library session or by fabricating a complex system to awe the reader. Instead, it is the reaction to what the genius has done that must be used to show how extraordinary such a feat would have to be.

Canon!Harry is a genius/prodigy in only one area: flying. This is clearly a procedural knowledge which requires no study on his part. He does learn from watching others fly, and he does improve with experience and practice, but JKR shows he is a genius by comparison.

So, it comes down to multiple intelligences and just what kind of prodigy/genius we're talking about. Is the genius based in verbal memory, logic, or a specific intellectual domain? In that case you need to give some hint at the complexity and depth of the knowledge being tested. Or is it spatial recognition, kinisthetic, or an incredible perception that creates the genius? In that case you'd need to contrast how others of a similar level cannot yet do what the genius character does with ease.

Personally, what I find tricky is the tactical genius. It's not that it's hard to portray that they come up with a brilliant strategy, it's that it is hard to justify their failure to do so at other times.

 

Part of the problem with writing a prodigy is that magic isn't real.

And yes, we know that, but just wait a minute.

Think about coding, or hacking. You probably either know someone who can, or you can yourself. Even if you don't exactly know how to code an Turing-capable AI, or understand the difficulties in hacking into the FBI's internal database, you might be able to understand some of the problems these tasks require.

I mean, I recently used R in my final year project, doing analysis of bat frequency over time. I've never used it before, and I don't really foresee using it again in the future.
I spent about eight hours being tutored in how to use it, and about fifteen hours writing in it, or editing pre-written processes. It all made logical sense, when I could read through a finished part, but I had no idea on how to construct anything by myself. I mostly followed instructions, or changed header lookups.
Whereas the guy who created the scripts in the first place took about three hours, and made them from scratch, to do a function he hadn't used before (I wanted to convert the time as a HH:MM into a TimeFromDusk/BeforeDawn/FromMidPoint, which would mean that 23:11 would be three different times, and those three times would change each night. It would then fit the data into categories based on which time was smallest). I sat through some of his script writing, and I could just about follow along while he explained it.

I then showed it to my dad, and could give rough explanations on what each section of the script did, and sometimes a really rough explanation on the how. My dad used to work as a programmer, so he was sort of familiar with it.

I could explain it all, and the relative amounts of effort involved, quite easily.


Literary analysis - we do basic levels of it in school. I had one English class when we were taught about how colours inspire emotion, and how the author can use this to direct our feelings. Another on word choice, how if I use small ones, I appear simpler when compared to someone who has a vocabulary numbering in the tens of thousands, and can winnow out the incorrect choices.
So if I read someone's analysis of something, even if I've never read the original work, I know of the effort required.

Or stress and strain on building materials. We covered some of this, did some work on how earthquakes effect structural integrity, and so on.
But I wouldn't have a clue on how to build to make buildings actually safe in the case of earthquakes. Or tornadoes. Or frequent flash floods.
But I can get a grasp of the work behind doing so.


But if we were to explain how transfiguring a matchstick into a needle works, where do we even start from?

There's certainly no shortage of stories where the process is defined as a transfiguration because the arithmantic calculation gives a unit value of 8, and an even ten value, whilst only working on a mostly wooden target because of the jab-twist-into-twirl.


But that's lazy, and makes the entire wizarding world stupid. If any spell can be performed as long as the incantation is known, and the wand motions (if any) performed, then there is no reason for first through third year students to not just be sat down with tables of wand motions, and told to memorize them, and perfect them. Or do it on their own time. Hell, that could be done pre-Hogwarts. During Flitwick's class in first year, we see that they have been going over the wand-motion. And, as Hermione points out to Ron, the incantation has to be said right.
And the spell just works.
Then Ron follows her advice, and his spell works too.


Without our own viewpoint, we have no reference for how good at magic someone is, short of comparisons. But because magic is so universe altering, anything short of god-like makes the characters look awful, stupid, or lazy to an outsider -
The Weasley family is poor. The parents are also capable of magic, and so are likely to have at least OWLs, and possibly NEWTs. Transfigurations at a simple level should not be beyond their capability, neither should repairing charms.
They have no reason to be dressed in poor quality clothing.
If transfigurations wear off, then just redo them every hour, or just short of when they would revert. Or repair them if they are frayed.
They don't even have to be changed into being solid gold thread or anything, just clean, functional, and not obviously second-hand.


And I'm sure that most everyone on the forum has come up with at least one plan to become super rich if they ever had had Harry's wizard powers. Some have even written it into a story.
Some might be a bit lacking in morals ("Alohamore, accio gold bullion!"), some less so (car boot, repairing charm, pawn shop), and some are basically victimless ("point me lost treasure").




So if you want to portray a prodigy, start from the normal person. Don't explain how they got so good, just show them being consistenly excellent. And have ViewpointCharacter be in/listen to a conversation about how unfair it is that [X] is so good with magic, as if they were born with talent.

Or just follow Mrs Weasley around for a day, and have her needing to search up the right spell for anything that isn't an everyday job, because she knows the dish-cleaning charm, and the anti-gnome hex. But when she can't find a quill to write her letter with, because Ron forgot to buy any last time he went to Diagon, she has to transfigure a fork into a quill, which is not a common thing to do.
Ron, however, has lost his quills at Hogwarts, so when he needs to reply to the letter his mum sent, he has to ask to borrow a quill from Harry. As they are at breakfast, Harry didn't bring any. On the other hand, Harry knows that because he's doing an inorganic-organic transfiguration, the incantation is going to be similar to 'transmure'; and because the objects are of similar size and mass, the motion is a double tap. Unfortunately, this creates an actual feather. So he uses a derivation of the sharpening charm to shape the end to a point, and an underpowered piercing hex to hollow the tip.


TL;DR We need to see where the normal people stand on something, to give us something to compare the prodigy to.

 

Damned double reply.

 

It probably says something about me and my hate for R, when after this long post of awesome points, all I focused on was that you spent hours on using R, and people still use that piece of shit. R and LaTeX are two things that are plaguing the scientific community.

Ahem...

To make this post even more controversial, I'd say Ender's Game has it done well-ish (except for Locke and Demosthenes) and even MoR made sense in that department.

 

Prodigies are youth who excel in one or more areas to a prodigious degree--think the seven year old who masters algebra or Tiger Woods in golf. It is often the case that prodigies are strongly influenced by environment. The Polgar sisters were trained to be chess champions from very early on, for example, and John McEnroe was pushed by his father from a very early age to master tennis (which he did). Geniuses are people with high IQ, tests of which approximate Spearman's g, a broad-spectrum correlative for "intelligence" as it's normally perceived. It is often the case that prodigies are geniuses as well.

R is just a language; that so much code has been written in R is one of the reasons why it's still used so much. (It's part of why despite the shortcomings, there's still a lot of FORTRAN out there.)

One's appreciation for LaTeX escalates when one has experimental colleagues who keep trying to write things in Word. This morning I'm called upon to edit a review paper done in Word with revision tracking turned on over a network. I think I'd rather give a kidney.

Large scientific writing projects are best done with LaTeX, compiled using Makefiles, and with the whole thing being managed by a revision control system like subversion (in my opinion, anyway).

In the future, please try to refer to it as "MoR" instead of by name; the author has the title of his story on Google Alert and has a habit of stopping by to troll whenever someone talks about him/it. It's really quite tedious.

I think Card is crap at writing children, but I think I'm in the minority on DLP in finding Ender's Game to be vastly overrated and a steaming heap of fridge horror (much like the author himself).

 

I actually like to think of Harry Potter Magic as music, and different branches as different instruments.

Anyone can learn to play basic melodies with piano, most everyone are capable of learning to play simple songs with guitar, and practice makes one better. Then there are people who just start composing symphonies at the age of twelve, and other people who can improvise and play jazz with any instrument. And still others are content at just listening to others play.

Thinking magic as something akin to music also allows for greater amount of fantasy and beauty, instead of turning magic into a boring science and series of strictly defined rules. It also gives you different ways of approaching magic: there's the Hermione way of obsessively learning "songs" by rote memorization, there's Snape who "composes" his own "music", there's Fred & George and the marauders who learn by doing and fooling around like some garage band would. And then we have Harry, who doesn't show much interest but when needed can learn complex things pretty quickly.

 

Taure hits the more canonish response, I think. If you want a prodigy Harry Potter you have to think in Albus Dumbledore and Tom Riddle. Trouble is, they are both pictured as adults. We're told how good they're in their teens, but it isn't much.

Thinking about those characters you have some standard rules, I believe any author should follow:

1) No matter how much understanding shows the character about the subject (magic), he/she must finish the 7 years at Hogwarts.
2) In a world where complex magic is executed by adults, with some cases like Harry's patronus as an exemption, teen!Harry can't replicate ADvsLV fight at the MoM.
3) If you're going to follow canon on the HPvsLV path, understand that Harry can't possibly beat Lord Voldemort in an open fight if he's a teenager. If he's a prodigy, less so. Remember his enemy was a child prodigy and is a genius adult.

If not followed, those rules (that are too implicit) get the reader bored, IMO.

 

Canon!Voldemort may be a genius but his thought processes are so far from logical or rational that a determined 10-year old with enough resources could probably take him in a open fight. Without magic.

 

It depends on the writer. If he wants to pool a Rowling, yeah. If not, well, he has some work to do.