I am more annoyed when its treated as a spell that everyone just knows about, like this scene in Oh God Not Again!

 

In Of Queens, Knights, and Pawns, the author keeps making stupidly long 50k chapters. It's annoying as hell and is why I stopped actively reading the story.

Almost no one has time to read through a 50k update, and there's no easy way to bookmark where you stopped. Not to mention breaking chapters up would make for way more consistent updates.

 

50k update?!? That's like a very short novel all in one update!

 

kathryn518 did those massive chapters as well. They're annoying but have never stopped me enjoying something.

Also the chapter The Last Battle in Wheel of Time is a book all on its own.

 

You can track a books page numbers easier than in an online chapter. The best you could do is find a fairly unique sentence and paste it in the title of a bookmark.

 

Overly long chapters really annoy me. Anything more than 8k or so I find to be an unreasonably long update. I'm convinced its why so many fics get abandoned, authors lose their steam mid chapter because they're trying to write huge chunks in one go. They'd keep up better momentum by writing and publishing shorter sections more frequently.

 

Reading random post war fic, when it comes to inheritance:

hihihi

and then few paragraphs down

hahahaha. Because trillions were not enough.

 

Written by people with no concept of the value of money, they have to go for ludicrously large numbers because they don't actually know what a large amount of money is.

 

I'm now imagining trying to justify those numbers by having the goblins invent derivatives in the middle ages, and most of their rebellions involved them trying to strong-arm the wizards into bailing them out when their financial instruments went bad.

 

For me a million dollars would be enough to solve all my problems for a very long time. Something like a trillion is just something a child would think of.

 

More likely, as we know from lottery winners, if you won or suddenly inherited a million dollars, your life would likely be far worse. Strangely, we never read a story where Harry inherits a quintillion dollars and trainwrecks his life right into the ground.

 

I'd pay off my debts and use the rest sparingly. No reason to buy expensive cars or mansions if you can't sustain the rich life.

 

I like to think I'd be so reasonable, but you can't really know until you win a million dollars, eh

 

Oh, I agree completely.

 

Lottery winners are a bit different from inheritances.

Most people who play the lottery are poor while most people with large inheritances waiting for them are rich (unless they were spoiled and never learnt anything).

The unfortunate reality is most poor people have very poor financial skills while many richer people (or people with rich parents) have financial skills.

 

It's not even about being poor vs. being rich. Playing the lottery is poor financial decision making no matter who you are, so making bad financial decisions is prerequisite for winning the lottery.

 

That depends on why you're doing it. I know well off people who play a game a week because it's fun, while there are people who actually think they will get rich off it.

 

Depends on what lottery you play. In the UK, for example, its a good way to donate to charitable causes with half of the cost of every ticket going to the National Lottery charity fund.

On the subject of what amount Harry would have to inherit for it to be life changing...

His 2 main inheritances from his parents are the vault of gold and their home in Godrics Hollow. If you own a property outright and have minimal educational expenses (we never see any indication that Hogwarts costs anything), then you don't need to inherit a whole lot of cash in order for it to be life changing. Especially in a world where your cost of living can be pretty damn low if you're reasonably competent at magic.

Harry's inheritance could be in the range of 20,000-50,000 galleons and it'd still be a great deal of wealth, and would also represent a big heap of gold from the perspective of a short 11 year old.

 

Just a reminder that once Harry found out he was rich one of the things he tried to buy was a cauldron made out of solid gold.

Though commendably he had enough self control in Prisoner of Azkaban not to buy the Firebolt,
the perfect, moving model of the galaxy or gobstones made from solid gold.

 

With pricing as bizarrely inconsistent as it is in HP, the solid gold cauldron could have cost anything from a couple of galleons to hundreds, we've no idea.