Well, my avatar is taken from the children’s book In The trolley Wood
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Fine, no time turners for the SAS.
(Huh, never thought about the lack of Irish wizards in the Potterverse…)
Whaat?
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In that vein, Mr. Voldemort could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d been willing to stoop to cooperation with the muggles.
Your target turns out to be protected by The Old Magic against a spell that should surely have killed him? Well, you have two options: spend years brooding darkly and gathering sinister power in the hopes that you can out-magic The Old Magic; or just hire some asshole to stab the kid to death.
Way to overcomplicate things, dark lord…
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I’ve come to believe Voldemort was really trying to prevent catastrophic climate change by wiping out those earth-ruining muggles.
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Scotty was an engineering genius, and yet Spock could always suggest solutions that Scotty hadn’t though of.
But there was an episode in TOS where, with communications down, Uhura kicks open a panel under her console and dives in to repair it. Spock suggests a solution. Uhura tells him “I’ve already tried that, Mr. Spock”, in the tone of voice of a condescending aunt to a retarded four year old.
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Actually they had a card catalog at one time, but Peeves got into it, and, well…
Edit to add: I know, I know, don’t cross the streams…
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If an aunt were speaking to a 4-year-old with cognitive disabilities, she would be gentle and cheerful and kind.
A condescending tone is reserved for people with normal brain activity who still somehow can’t handle basic thought.
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Ah, but Voldemort and his ilk explicitly looked down on muggles. He would have never stooped to it.
I picture something more like a muggle-born wizard rallying the people they spent half their lives amongst against Voldemort’s racist (Speciest? What does a hereditary predisposition to magic imply?) wizards, providing stuff that levels the playing field. That would then be followed by the likely very dark consequences of a charismatic leader handing out weapons to people who’ve suddenly realized they’re the underclass, but vastly more numerous.
Someone could have written a very different series of novels about Harry vs. Voldemort.
There’s the Salem Witches’ Institute.
But what about the rest of the world? The Harry Potter universe seems to be an instance of the world view where there are about three different languages spoken in the world - English, French and English with a generic mix of a Russian and German accent.
With the Durmstrang school, Rowling apparently never even made up her mind about whether to use Russian, Skandinavian or German stereotypes.
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Oh that’s just typical: the only place of witch/wizard higher-ed is in the Boston metro area.
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The new movie that’s coming out next year is set in NYC, so yes:
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I still think all things considered somewhere in the vicinity of Estonia makes the most sense. The Livonian past would explain the rather puzzling German associations.
But then there is an apparent absence of anything Estonian in the books. Well, maybe the Union of Soviet Wizards still rules Wizarding Estonia and the Russian language is in a more dominant position than it is among Estonian muggles.
But, geographically, it doesn’t fit. Durmstrang is described as being in a mountainous area, and there is a complaint about it getting very little sunlight. The highest “mountain” in Estonia is a little over 300m, and its far enough south to get 6 hours of sunlight at winter solstice.
Anyway…not fair of me, Spock just seems to assume everyone around him has no frickin’ clue.
One of the things the newer movies got right: they weren’t afraid to let the audience know, explicitly, that Uhura knows her shit. I kinda figured they had to go there after Hoshi on Enterprise.
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Duh. The most enviable part of the whole Matrix concept, by far, was the “whoa. I know kung fu” concept of bittorrenting a choice of skills directly into the brain.
I don’t know about you, but I’d take that in a heartbeat over dedicating 20+ of one’s best years to school-related drudgery in the name of “education”. Especially homework.
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That made me curious as well. “The rest of the friggin’ wizard world” sounds like a subject rife with extended story potential, if not too badly handled. A quick search indicates there were supposed to be no less than eleven wizarding schools in the canon, which was surprising to me.
Now I want to find out what the unnamed Brazilian one would be like apart from the two lines dedicated to it in the books. Hopefully not too much like Clortho.
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Sure; but as we see every day, looking down on someone is no obstacle to treating them not as an end; but as a means merely as hard as possible and having them do your dirty jobs.
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I was re-watching TOS recently and I’d never realized how much Uhura sasses Spock in those early episodes. No wonder the new movies have them hook up.
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