Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.
"modern technology just doesn't work"
I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It's surprising to me that "and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology" is where you would decide to roll your eyes.
Because it's a cop out. You're not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It's the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.
Harry potter isn't the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.
There's also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn't work. An electric kettle won't work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don't have limits or an idea of what's dangerous/important
Sometimes the answer could be "hey, we don't know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn't there yet."
But maybe it doesn't matter to the story. HP isn't a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There's all kinds of things we didn't and/or don't fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the "rules" of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don't see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It's not that sort of magic - I'd call it a "soft-ish" magic system if we're going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.
I get your points, I'm not trying to say you are wrong, I'm just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn't the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.
Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that's a matter of personal preference, not "correctness" if that makes any sense.
I feel like there are actually multiple counter-examples to this, but they're all much better realised worlds than Harry Potter
Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren't directly related to her story.
More like: they know how modern technology works and have designed spells dedicated to preventing them from functioning.