93
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
93 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
28628 readers
2010 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I think there’s a bit in the first book where Harry says his parents were shot, and Hagrid laughs and says no muggle gun could have killed them.
But like, why not? It’s never explained. I’m sure if they survived being shot, magic medicine would sort them out pretty quickly. But there’s no reassign to think a gun couldn’t kill them. Wizards struggle to react fast enough to block spell s most of the time, and bullets seem to move faster than that.
I think the hardest part would be successfully ambushing Voldy, but no reason to think a gun wouldn’t fuck him up if you can hit him.
He's not omniscient, is he? In addition to being quite genre-blind, he's also never demonstrated to have any clairvoyance or inherent extrasensory capabilities other than knowing when his name is spoken, which is presumably some kind of specific enchantment he uses to terrorize people.
A common rifle bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, and if you fired from a concealed location you could absolutely pop him right in the dome well before the sound of the gunshot even made it to him and before anyone knew you were there. All it would take would be a little scouting to research which graveyard he and his groupies are moping around in and anyone could do him from half a mile off with a $99 surplus Mosin-Nagant.
I suppose it's possible he walks around with a twenty mile wide circle of detection on himself or some horseshit, but given the aforementioned genre-blindness he's probably got whatever it is tuned to be looking for other magic users or harmful spells and not, e.g., the Bouncing Betty that some clever asshole left right in front of his crypt.
I can't remember if it's mentioned in the books, but I think the idea is that Muggle technology stops working in the presence of magic. Guns would jam, electronics would brick, etc.
Granted, this raises the question of where do you draw the line? For example, the magical world has countless exploding substances. What if they took some, stuffed it down a long metal tube, insterted a small metal object in front of it, then set fire to the explosive stuff from the back end? That's basically a gun or cannon, and it's hard to argue that it's technologically complex.
That's really the rub. The notion that magic "knows" what technology is and draws the line at some arbitrary point where it suddenly rearranges the laws of reality around itself so that these devices won't work specifically in the way that humans expect them to raises the following two horrifying possibilities:
One, whatever force is actually behind magic must be intelligent in and of itself, even if only in a brutish and rudimentary way. It would take a staggering array of quite specific and tailor-made microspells or localized tweaks in physics to make all types of Muggle technology fail to work consistently. Like, it's not just enough to say "guns jam." Does magic physically grab the hammer and stop it from falling? Does it block the firing pin? Does it rearrange the laws of chemistry so that oxidation reactions don't happen? Does it stick its finger in the end of the barrel like Bugs Bunny?
Or, like, fountain pens. They work via exactly the same mechanism as quill pens, it's just that they contain their own store of ink. Is there any other reason why a quill would work within Hogwarts but a fountain pen wouldn't? Here in rational space, no. Absolutely not. So if that's how it is, there must be something more going on behind the scenes and the fact that these bozos either haven't noticed or worse, that they have noticed and just don't care enough to investigate in any way whatsoever is equal parts creepy and infuriating.
So point two, given all of the above the force behind magic is also probably actively malevolent. Who knows what its agenda is keeping wizards locked in a kind of medieval stasis, or if it's even doing so on purpose or just as a byproduct of its natural function, but either way it's clearly not working in humanity's best interest.
(There's a third option as well, which is that it works this way because the author has such a poor grasp on reality that she thinks that guns/electronics/cars/whatever also work via some kind of "magic" which can thus be disrupted, which is possibly likely but also so stupid it makes my right eyebrow twitch just thinking about it. So we'll leave it at that.)