I actually like the darts analogy. But I think that's because it support the 'magic as a manipulable force' theory as opposed to the 'magic's just magic' one. Unless I'm just seeing a different construction of the simile.

Anyway, yes it was incomplete (purpose of thread!) and I'll accept that there's more she could (should) have given the slightly more studious, or fanatical, of her fans. There probably is a bridge, and it's all conjecture anyway, but all I attempt to get across is that what we're told about it being complex and what we see of it not being could potentially be solved, by someone smarter than I, by treating magic as a palpable, measurable force rather than something that just is. Give it limitations (like we're shown in half of canon) and ignore the discrepancies (the examples of the other half) and the issue's solved, as opposed to ignoring the former (eg: Harry trying to levitate Hagrid and getting pulled down towards him) and only using the latter (Ron and the troll's club).

Yes, it could be a subconscious ease - hence practicing magic at all. But having something without any sort of fundamental limit doesn't really make for very good reading, and I'm not entirely convinced it's what she intended.

 

We should take into account that the Harry Potter series is technically for children so it wasn't really necessary for JK to create a perfectly functional magical system. The targeted audience wouldn't put in as much thought for this as we do.

 

Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997. I was nine. I am the target fucking audience, and I know for a fact that most DLPers are around my age.

 

Indeed. But that's largely irrelevant to the discussion of how magic works in this and other threads on the topic. We've been trying to use the hints and facts she did place in canon to develop a self-consistent, explainable system of magic for our own benefit. Not only does it increase our enjoyment, it enhances fics by increasing their coherence and development.

So why Rowling left her magic system as largely a jumble of inconsistencies doesn't really matter to the discussion.

EDIT: Tehan there's a difference between you now and when you were nine. Her target audience was and is young kids. The fact that the nine year old kids grew up doesn't change that fact. A books target audience doesn't change as the generation that was the initial target audience ages. Saying it does it like saying that the target audience for Dr. Seuss is now 60 year-olds instead of 6 year-olds.

 

Plus, Rowling has stated in interview that she wrote the books for herself, not for any particuar audience.

Somewhat supported by how the later books are hardly child-friendly in content. Multiple character deaths, torture, etc.

 

Yeah I don't buy that. Any published book has a target audience. Maybe the author initially didn't have one but the publishing house at least develops one and pushes the writer. Also people say this all the time because it makes them sound more sophisticated and detached from the commercial nature of publishing.

And you have a point about the later books. But the early books are undoubtedly children's books. Whether the audience for the books changed later on, the early books were intended for and marketed for children, which does mean the planning and internal consistency of her world doesn't need to be nearly as well developed.

 

Well, that's what kids are into in the today's world. Aren't they cute little monsters?

They say it, because for 95% of authors it's true.

 

Your opinion. I disagree. People write because they want to make a point about the world. They write for their children. They write sequels to continue the money train they stumbled into. They write for various other reasons.

I especially don't believe it in the world of children's literature. It's a vast, hugely populated field with tons of authors. These people are not writing books that are aimed specifically at children, and are frequently watered down and written in oversimplified language "for themselves."

 

The magic system doesn't come down to "it's for kids," vs. "it's not for kids." Even among adults, I think that it's mostly the more quantitative types - which are quite common here - who would even consider having a discussion like this one.

Rowling was never much interested in the mechanics of bog-standard magic, where precision and consistency would be most apparent. Consider the troll scene in PS. The important part of that scene is not the levitation spell Ron used to save Hermione, but the fact that he and Harry came to rescue her at all. For the most part, magical spells and creations are merely the things that Rowling inserted in Slot A to get Effect B. In HP canon I have no problem with this, but just sayin'.

The only bits of magic that are irreplaceably woven into the story are the ones where normal magical mechanics, such as they are, fail. Nebulous stuff, like sacrificial magic and wandlore - stuff that characters in the story have trouble explaining.

 

Uh...
The first book has semi-graphic descriptions of Harry burning Quirrel to death his bare hands.
The second book has mind-rape and various near-death experiences.
The third book shows the perils of a bad justice system and two adults who nearly execute a revenge-killing, as well as dementors.
The fourth book has forced compliance in a deadly tournament, a character death, depictions of gore, and various murder attempts.
...
yeah totally kids books.

 

You're exaggerating the impact of the scenes. The description of Quirrell's death isn't that graphic. Also, he's the "bad guy" who kids expect to die. Kid's aren't going to understand the concept of "mind rape" so that's largely irrelevant. She deliberately goes out of her way to avoid anyone "good" being permanently injured, let alone killed till GOF.

And it's honestly irrelevant whether the material in the books is "kids material" by your standards. In today's society, kids see worse than the HP all the time in the movies and on TV. Other kids books today are considerably more graphic. The fact is that the writing style of the books is intended for kids. The marketing and promotion of the books was clearly directed at the children's market.

Ergo they are kids books.

 

Actually, when Rowling wrote PS she didn't write it for kids. she didn't even think it would get published.

The decision to market it to kids was made by Bloomsbury.

 

The reason there are so many plot holes is that she didn't plan beyond the first book when she was writing it. As it is, I'm not sure if she failed the same way from books 2-7, but it seems like it.

 

Taure you can write something for a particular audience and still think that it won't be published. The two are in no way mutually exclusive. I would argue that Bloomsbury marketed it to children because the style and content were clearly that of a kids book.

But for the sake of discussion I'll grant your premise. The publishers choose to market it to children and it wasn't necessarily Rowling's intention. But that doesn't matter to the underlying point about the intended audience of the book and it's glaring issues in development.

At some point, it was decided that this was a childrens book. Thus the world didn't need to be as fully developed, and all plot holes and consistency issues as clearly addressed as would be the case for a more discerning audience. If the book had been intended for an adult, more critical audience, as a more serious work, then the publishers / her editor would have made her spend more time on those issues.

Anyway we're way off topic. Who the books were or were not intended for, and why the plot holes exist is not germane to the discussion. We debate and discuss the nature of the HP magic system to increase our enjoyment and to improve our fanfiction. (My original point.)

 

I don't have a problem with magic utterly ignoring physics - that's pretty much what makes magic . . . magic. By definition.

I don't have a problem costless casting.

I have a problem with the epic amount of asspull that comprises the magical not-system of the HP Universe. I mean, this is literally why, in my attempts to create a d20 HP game, I threw my hands up in the air and threw out the HP magic part of it, and simply modified the D&D system so that the material components are wands and only wands, and somatic components are how you wave that wand. The verbal components are the incantation. Finally, you just treat the spell school as a skill (with ranks and governed by one of the stats, rather than just Int, Wis, or Cha). Each spell has a clearly (for the most part) defined effect (which might increase as your level goes up, but it increases consistently). Furthermore, each spell has a clearly defined duration, which means that it comes to an end (though some do have permanent effects). This creates dramatic tension, and also gives us a reason for an economy. You don't conjure your clothing not because you're afraid of someone casting finite on it (after all, someone can just vanish it just as easily), but because it will vanish on its own after a while.

It would have been better, in my opinion, for Rowling to have basically done the same thing, only creating her own original spells and whatnot rather than using D&D. She could have eliminated the ass-pull that plagues the books.

And Taure, you're absolutely right on one point that bothered me to no end as well: Why in the HELL is magic SO underused in a magical society where casting spells costs you nothing?

 

Lol @ the epic tangent.

'Target audiences' are irrelevant to the author - as in the creator and sole holder of the intellectual property - as well they should be. The last thing a Screenwriter & Director is thinking about is the commercials. The reader is what is important, be that the author themselves or people in 65 languages.

More importantly, there was a decade between PS' and DH's publications, so Tehan's point about being the kids who read it does have merit, because people have grown up with it. Finally, the woman's had fans since the first book, the film rights to the first two were sold for $5million+ in '98, serious HP fanfic has been around since GoF (which sold more on its first day than PoA did in its first year), she's been asked every type of question about the mechanics of her world in interviews (which should hint that people want to know), and all of this makes her completely responsible for her own creation and entirely to blame if she hasn't done enough work on it in the sixteen years she spent writing it... whether she's written it for kids, or anyone else, she's sold 400 million copies. Everyone's reading it. And an author has a responsibility to his/her readers, especially when those readers actually give a shit.

 

The Harry Potter books are unquestionably children/YA literature. Murders and mind-rapes and all. (Had you never read any children or YA fiction before Harry Potter, that you think character death, torture, and mind control is something that hasn't been seen before in kidlit?) Rowling may not have thought "I am writing for children" and there is nothing wrong with adults enjoying children's literature, but everything about the Harry Potter series is juvenile. (I mean that in a literal, not pejorative sense -- it's just not adult fiction. "Adult" does not necessarily mean "better written," just to get that out of the way. It's about vocabulary, plot points, themes, how much you tell vs. show, how much knowledge of the world and previous works of literature you need to have to understand what you're reading, etc.)

That said, I disagree somewhat with this:

Rowling may have been aware that millions of fans would like to be able to write up Harry and Ron and Hermione as RPG characters, but that doesn't mean she had an obligation to systematize her magic system in a way to make it conducive to doing so. All she had an obligation to do was to make her worldbuilding consistent. (She was only partially successful in this.)

Magic in Harry Potter is plot-driven. It serves the needs of the story, not the other way around, and almost always, that's for the best in fantasy fiction (as opposed to fantasy RPGs, where you have hard and fast rules to keep players from godmodding.) Rowling worked out the basics of her magic system, but they're conceptual, not mechanical -- her rules served the needs of her story, not the needs of satisfying a bunch of nerds who want to know how many Fatigue Points a Shield Charm costs.

 

This is a false analogy. There is literally no correlation between commercials that run alongside (not part of) a film or tv work and the expected audience of a book. Commercials are selected based on the people who will be watching the film. A book is written differently if its for children as opposed to adults.

But the fact is the first books were written when these people were children and sold primarily for children. No one was intending them for 20+ year olds to dissect the world and so neither Rowling nor the publishers cared about that.

First of all, when the film rights were sold it was clearly though it would be a movie targeted at kids. Which guess what? They were. Kids movies all over the place aren't entirely internally consistent or that well developed.

As for a responsibility to the reader? I don't agree. She's not anymore responsible for developing the world because it's wildly successful than she would be if it weren't successful. She's responsible for writing and finishing the stories and that's fucking it. Anything is just gravy whether the readers give a shit or not.

Harry Potter whether originally written for kids or herself didn't have an incredibly detailed system of magic / political system / anything else. And just because the initial kid readers aged as the series was written in no way required her to further develop one. Just as many new kids started reading it and enjoyed it for the same reasons as we initially did, and new kids pick it up every day. And that's fine as is her vagueness because HP was and is a fucking children's series.

tl;dr. Of course the writing of a book is tailored to /appeals to an audience. Rowling has no obligation to you or any one else to develop her system. If you want a highly developed magical system in HP develop your own in a way that makes you happy. Critical 20 year olds have much higher expectations of a kids magic series than is a reasonable.

 

No, it's a better analogy than I'd thought it might be. A director concentrates on telling a story. A distributor concentrates on marketing it. Marketing for a film, much like a book, comes a lot later in the game (because the amount that make it to that point are about the same statistically). 'Target Audiences' are publisher and, to an extent, editor's terminology, and Rowling wasn't thinking 'target audience' when she scrawled out the first few sentences on a National Rail napkin. 'Audience', or 'Reader', perhaps, but as Taure points out she claims to have not been that optimistic. What it came out as in the process is one thing, but it developed into more as her characters did and, crucially, as she as an author did too.

You've missed the part where she spent sixteen years writing it, nine of which with fans, and the whole point of that paragraph was that she didn't come out the other side with the same product she went in with. You write a book for yourself - fine. But when the book, and sequels, are in demand you begin to write for an audience (just like in film), and as you say, the audience were primarily children... but the themes in the books matured to some extent as she got through them, and she did develop further magical bits and bobs as she went along, because her readerbase wasn't just a) Herself and b) kids. My point was that she should have been more thorough. 'It's for kids' is not a valid excuse when so many of your readers aren't. She started without an audience, but in the end wrote for the audience.

Yes, she's responsible for writing and finishing the stories. Glad you pointed that out. There're some that would argue that a fleshed-out environment is a part of that. As she began to develop her world through the books anyway, those same few might argue that a fuller (or at least more consistent) look at the most important element of the stories is integral. Because there's a million stories about kids who have it hard and manage to become heroes, but this here shit's got magic.

She did it anyway. Just incompletely. If she'd left it as was and shrugged, fine, because that's her prerogative. Instead she gave us contradictions and half-theories. Hence thread. Hence rant.

Exactly the attitude every aspiring author should have; 'Plotholes? Inconsistencies? Fuck it - let the fans write their own version.'

Fanfic should be just that - as in using another author's world as a set for your own story. The Potter fandom achieves this. But when such heated debates can take place as to what canon entails when there's four thousand pages of it, something's gone wrong. You said 'Of course the writing of a book is tailored to /appeals to an audience'... and it's right. So when people began to scrutinise her work more closely, not just clap their hands and sing along, the inevitable happened.

tl;dr: If you're going to do it, do it right. She created an incredible thing in Harry Potter, but yes, there's a critical audience, and it's comprised of those same young kids who read Harry Potter in the era. What else are those kids going to do but ask questions, and demand answers, when they grow up? Or should they just grow out of it, and think 'fuck it, was for kids anyway, doesn't need to make sense'?

 

Of course she wasn't. And target audience, as in marketing etc. are different from writing for an audience. But writing, at least planned good writing does in fact have an audience in mind. Ask nearly any writing teacher. Beyond that look at any writing. Kurt Vonnegut's writing and readers are different from JKR's writing and readers, are different from Dr. Seuss's writing and readers. You know how you tell what audience the book was written for? The style and content primarily. JKR's writing is clearly for a younger audience. To argue otherwise is facetious. And writing for a younger audience does not require the same degree of development and sophistication.

The fact is that yes it is. HP is a children's series. Its primary readers were children, and as it the world moves on its primary new readers will be children. If she has a large number of reader's that aren't children she doesn't have to change the way she writes or level of detail for them. Similarly, if large numbers of children had suddenly began reading Neal Stephenson, he wouldn't and shouldn't have lessened the degree of detail and complexity in his world for them.

Anyway I would have loved if she had developed her world more completely. But I disagree with your assertion that she was in some way obligated to do so because her initial readers aged as she wrote the series.

And it's fine if the kids who grew up reading the series want answers now that they're older. I sure do. But the fact is that the fundamental nature of the series as children's fantasy novels hasn't changed just because we aged. They don't, as a general rule, have a highly developed, coherent world. If we want a comprehensive system extrapolate from the novels and go from there. Hence this thread.

tl;dr. I'd love a comprehensive system, and I appreciate people's attempts to develop one. But to expect and demand one out of the published novels of a children's fantasy series is a little ridiculous. Even if we did grow up with it.