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Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)

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wildredlifer said:
One way i've seen used to Deal with that incongruence with the schools would to have those named Hogwarts, Etc.
Be Internationally Certified schools with national schools beneath Graduation gives something along the lines of a International Drivers license for magic.
This likely isn't Cheap.
Graduate Hogwarts or the others and you can get a job anywhere in the world without having to retake each nations Certifications Exams to be employed to do magic Their versions of OWLS and Newts.

Whereas those graduating from the national schools if they moved to another country.
They'd have to pass that nations certification exams to be employable in that country.
Thoughts?
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I've seen a variation of this in the fic 'Godling Ascending' (a HP-PJO crossover).
The big schools like Hogwarts/Durmstrang/Beauxbatons are meant for the cream of the crop - the 1% of the magical population that is capable of using all branches of magic (not necessarily well, but capable of at least basic competence, i.e, OWL level, in all of them). Meanwhile, everyone else can only use 1 or maybe 2 branches of magic, and learn at specialized schools for their specialty.
 
wildredlifer said:
Whereas those graduating from the national schools if they moved to another country.
They'd have to pass that nations certification exams to be employable in that country.
Thoughts?
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I would actually think if they did that there would be some harmonization between the different national governments to increase the validity and ensure equal quality of their licenses. This is because I doubt that when other countries want foreign workers or be a more pleasing place for immigrants there isn't going to be some complex model to allow rating and comparing lincenses for it to be easier with an eye to be convertible to a 1:1 ratio.
 
Greydrone said:
I've seen a variation of this in the fic 'Godling Ascending' (a HP-PJO crossover).
The big schools like Hogwarts/Durmstrang/Beauxbatons are meant for the cream of the crop - the 1% of the magical population that is capable of using all branches of magic (not necessarily well, but capable of at least basic competence, i.e, OWL level, in all of them). Meanwhile, everyone else can only use 1 or maybe 2 branches of magic, and learn at specialized schools for their specialty.
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Not sure I like the implication of people being good or bad at magic because they weren't born good enough rather than because of intelligence or hard work.

I mean, if it goes like this, you could say the only reason Ron is a shit wizard is because he wasn't born as powerful as Voldemort, and that Dumbledore is this powerful not because he is intelligent and put his life into his magic research, but because he is lucky.
 
The best explanation for the disparity between Hogwarts and the other schools as well as the general screwyness of what we see is that Britain is somewhat of an isolationist pariah.
Distances certainly mean much less to wizards so centralising makes some sense.

I very much doubt a school in Amazonian Brazil would be the largest in South America though.
Also India has no listed school so there's probably a whole lot of smaller ones. Even then, many would have to be larger than Hogwarts though.
 
Silently Watches said:
Yeah, 3 schools in Europe (4 if you include the Russian school), and to make things even more interesting, Hogwarts ONLY takes British/Irish students whereas Beauxbatons takes students from all of Western Europe and Durmstrang takes students from Eastern Europe. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense no matter how you look at it. I plan to treat it, if it ever becomes relevant, that most countries in Europe have their own school. Of course, I also tend to make the magical population larger to justify why they want to live in separate societies anyway.
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I mean, if you take this at face value, one interesting effect is that it explains how Britain--and to a lesser extent Europe--basically conquered the known world during the Age of Exploration/Colonization, in a world with magic--they had way more wizards than anyone else.
If you try to come up with an explanation, maybe something like the number of local wizards influences the number of local muggleborn both directly (squibs & unsavory) and indirectly (ambient magic?), and that magic originated in Atlantis, then the survivors fled to Greece, then Rome, then Britain, and so wizarding Britain theoretically has 4000-year-old bloodlines that descend from Atlantis and that's why everyone obsessed with heritage.

Though yes, saying that there are more wizards probably makes more sense.
 
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Darth Bayes said:
and that magic originated in Atlantis, then the survivors fled to Greece, then Rome, then Britain, and so wizarding Britain theoretically has 4000-year-old bloodlines that descend from Atlantis and that's why everyone obsessed with heritage.
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We know that there were wizards in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, so that timeline doesn't really work.

Also, the statute of secrecy and general apathy of wizards towards the Muggle world would likely mean that Britain was successful only for irl reasons.
We could perhaps argue that the wizarding world was partly responsible for the downfall of the Nazis, since we know that Grindlewald interfered there, though.
 
ROTH963 said:
Not sure I like the implication of people being good or bad at magic because they weren't born good enough rather than because of intelligence or hard work.

I mean, if it goes like this, you could say the only reason Ron is a shit wizard is because he wasn't born as powerful as Voldemort, and that Dumbledore is this powerful not because he is intelligent and put his life into his magic research, but because he is lucky.
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That's... real life? Certain people have certain talents, some people are just better at certain things than others, and in turn those others are better at something else.
Also, I said nothing about power; Dumbledore and Voldemort gained their power through hard work. Dumbledore could have been equally powerful if he had only been able to use Transfiguration - he was powerful because he put in the effort and work to hone his magic to that level. Just like how the vast majority of 'talented athletes' go nowhere and a tiny fraction go on to get sports scholarships, and an even tinier fraction go on to compete professionally, and a truly minuscule number become Olympic athletes (way too many 'ands' in this sentence, but I'm too tired to rewrite it).
 
pandadogunited said:
There could have been migrants before Atlantis fell tragedy isn't the sole reason for migration after all
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I have no real problem with Atlantis existing in Harry Potter, but Plato lived thousands of years after the Pyramids were built and part of his inspiration was probably Egyptian coastal cities anyway.

I think it's a reasonable interpretation that magic is inherent to all human populations, and that wizarding societies gradually congregated together and isolated themselves. Invoking some mythical bronze age culture in the Atlantic kinda stomps all over other wizarding groups elsewhere and also sets a limit to the diversity of magical traditions.
 
Luma said:
I have no real problem with Atlantis existing in Harry Potter, but Plato lived thousands of years after the Pyramids were built and part of his inspiration was probably Egyptian coastal cities anyway.

I think it's a reasonable interpretation that magic is inherent to all human populations, and that wizarding societies gradually congregated together and isolated themselves. Invoking some mythical bronze age culture in the Atlantic kinda stomps all over other wizarding groups elsewhere and also sets a limit to the diversity of magical traditions.
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Atlantis is supposed to be a super advance civilization they could conceivably travel the world. If Atlantis was real it wouldn't have came 8nto existence when Plato wrote it down it would have existed for a long time beforehand
 
Greydrone said:
That's... real life? Certain people have certain talents, some people are just better at certain things than others, and in turn those others are better at something else.
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And you can determine this talent in eleven years old kids who never learned magic, but than again, magic might be capable, although if it is than shouldn't it be capable of easily proving the blood purists wrong, as I am under the impression they have no real proof of whatever they are right or wrong, and there is no mention of talent scores in canon that some people will definitely boast about.

If you are saying being capable of doing charms and doing transfiguration and charms is a different thing, and that some people are born being incapable of doing one but capable of doing the other it is a different thing, there is no mention of it in canon but it is fanfiction and the author can definitely put it.

but I was under the impression you meant that there is clear cut different, but this
Greydrone said:
(not necessarily well, but capable of at least basic competence, i.e, OWL level, in all of them).
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as in some people having the abillity to do transfiguration at below owl level and charms at a little above it imply that it goes all the way, if it isn't a thing of yes or no (as in either being capable of doing charms or not, without a middle ground if having talent of third years Hogwarts student or something, and some people will be more talented but you can't really determine it ahead), than it opens the possibility to even the higher levels determining your power regardless of how talented you are, someone with owl level talent can't become a Voldemort no matter how smart or how hard working he is.

Because it isn't like Hogwarts is some later school only the best can get into, so you can't put a number on the child's abillities ahead of time (outside of something like being incapable of doing certain magic, if it is a thing here).
Luma said:
We could perhaps argue that the wizarding world was partly responsible for the downfall of the Nazis, since we know that Grindlewald interfered there, though.
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Grindlewall dying doesn't mean the nazis just stopped.
Luma said:
I think it's a reasonable interpretation that magic is inherent to all human populations
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Maybe it just sometimes happen and when a homo sapient become magical it becomes either a wizard or a squib, we know there are plenty magical animals, maybe animals just sometimes born magical, genetics don't have to do anything with it, it is magic, maybe it is like radiation with father wizards irradiating their seed and mothers irradiating their baby in the womb.
pandadogunited said:
they could conceivably travel the world.
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Magic makes it much easier, some wizards figuring out teleportation when they are kids like Hazel and teaching the rest of magical population can easily do it.
 
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I mean, technically Silently has not really made mention of the other continents yet, so they could potentially go whole hog and alter everything and go full AU, so that United States does not exist and there is a much more reasonably sized group of counties in its place, that the Rape of Africa inexplicably died in its cradle, and the Kingdom of Hawai'i is still going strong etc.

Go big or go home :V
 
Sivantic said:
I mean, technically Silently has not really made mention of the other continents yet, so they could potentially go whole hog and alter everything and go full AU, so that United States does not exist and there is a much more reasonably sized group of counties in its place, that the Rape of Africa inexplicably died in its cradle, and the Kingdom of Hawai'i is still going strong etc.

Go big or go home :V
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That's... a bit much? I'm going to have enough work to do with what I already have planned.
 
Silently Watches said:
That's... a bit much? I'm going to have enough work to do with what I already have planned.
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Oh most definitely, thus the sarcasm emoticon.

My point was mostly that we have only seen the tiniest corner of what is going on in this world, we have no idea what has and has not changed, and we are already awed. So whatever you come up with, pretty sure we are going to enjoy it.
 
ROTH963 said:
If you are saying being capable of doing charms and doing transfiguration and charms is a different thing, and that some people are born being incapable of doing one but capable of doing the other it is a different thing, there is no mention of it in canon but it is fanfiction and the author can definitely put it.
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I see you misunderstood me. It is fanon, an explanation created to explain why there are so few students at Hogwarts. It's not canon. I was just arguing that it's a plausible explanation.
 
I ended up thinking about this fic and how Hazel comes up with new spells earlier while my cousin and I were discussing fictional magic systems, and he brought up a pretty interesting point.

Assuming the complication of the tool (or how Hazel understands how it works) matters, then a gun would probably not work (not to mention how she would even come up with that). But a bow and arrow would work wonders and would be easier to imagine, given how many times Hazel visits places that are essentially historical tourist sites.

Places like those would assumably have some excavated weapons on display. Hazel could very well bust out something like Zelda's Bow of Light if she ever needed to defend herself.
 
Greydrone said:
I see you misunderstood me. It is fanon, an explanation created to explain why there are so few students at Hogwarts. It's not canon. I was just arguing that it's a plausible explanation.
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I feel like "there was just a war in Wizarding Britain, so there's less kids" is plenty of reason there. Though admittedly one would then expect a bit of a baby-boom starting some time around Harry's third year, which does not appear to have occurred in canon (or at least went un-remarked-on).
 
Thinking about it, we can reference regional mythology.
Europe - RIFE with magic in the ancient era, but such things fell out of favor over time as the herbalists, druids, mystics, oracles, etc became no longer publicly acceptable in favor of Christian beliefs(especially when many such were significant members of rival religions before they got conquered or culturally assimilated). There was a more recent outbreak of mysticism conciding with the early scientific age, and these were fairly varied and shamelessly looted from mystical traditions of many regions, as well as being the main point in time where wands really took off in popular culture as a symbol of magic.

So, reparsing that as Secret History. The Old School practitioners of magic went into hiding and largely died out as a community with their religions, barring a master-apprentice lineages that get increasingly muddled and confused for lack of ability to function as a society - most of them were enemies and rivals of each other, and magic users can be incredibly long lived - they wouldn't be able to work together until the old codgers holding grudges died out. Magical talents of Europe went untaught, manifesting as all sorts of freaky phenomenon, saints and miracleworkers.

Then it hit critical mass where there was a lot of untaught magic users while Europe was taking its first and very confused steps into modern sciences. Their uncontrolled magic was eventually brought in line by creative application of geometry, recovered chunks of mysticism, whatever surviving witch and druid lineages they could find.
And these scholars were also likely to be of noble or at least wealthy origins, the lower classes weren't getting the kind of consistent education or idle time to explore magic in any kind of organized manner.

That'd get you what you see:
-European wizards mainly taking their aesthetics from a rather specific social, economic AND historical snapshot, but having approaches liberally stolen from numerous cultures and regions, but interpreted out of context.
-The number of rival schools in Europe being high - of course they would be, most of those regions at the time hated the shit out of each other and certainly would not be sending their children over to the enemy.
-The singular, unified wand casting approach because they all developed in the same time span and could actually source international reagents effectively and more or less just landed in the right regions and stole the same research materials from past religions.
-Wizarding culture being eccentric and rather out of touch with reality - so were the social class the founding groups drew from.
-Noble lineages likewise, the people most likely to have discovered wand casting would have needed to organize a society and they'd quite naturally go with what they know and already are at the top of.

So what about other regions?
Just look to their mystic traditions.
Native American shamans went down with their tribes to colonialism.
Australian/South African shamans same, but given the sheer size of Australia/Africa it is likely that some managed to stick it out there by the time things wound down.
South Asian, Southeast Asian, North African and Middle Eastern traditions got displaced by Islam much like the European native faiths got assimilated by Christianity.
The Taoists were sorceror-philosopher-priests with respected places at court -> Cultural Revolution kind of finished off what the colonial powers didn't.

So the answer to what happened to wandless casting is fairly simple - Wand casting rode on the back of imperial powers and organized religion to push out the quaint local practices, then promptly forgot that those practices WORKED. Nothing much to do with the superiority of the method, its riding along on a tide they couldn't overcome.
 
veekie said:
Nothing much to do with the superiority of the method, its riding along on a tide they couldn't overcome.
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It probably is superior is some aspects (with the clear disadvantage that those taught by it can't really use magic if it is taken away), otherwise why use and make it, in what it is superior depends on the author (it allowing transfiguration alone probably isn't all of it).

Also, a big part of what revived magic society might have been the creation of Hogwarts, where magic users had gone untaught before, the creation of Hogwarts brought a new age that allowed magical society to thrive, with others copying their success, before it magic was more connected to regular society with no separation, but the widespreadness of Christianity made practicing magic openly impossible.
 
veekie said:
Thinking about it, we can reference regional mythology.
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Just wanted to say that this post is very well though out, and it's going to be my headcanon for anything HP related going forward. It's awesome.
ROTH963 said:
It probably is superior is some aspects (with the clear disadvantage that those taught by it can't really use magic if it is taken away), otherwise why use and make it, in what it is superior depends on the author (it allowing transfiguration alone probably isn't all of it).
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I would say that the best idea is that wands, by allowing greater focus, make magic easier as well as opening the possibility for more powerful spells at the high end of the skill spectrum; basically, they're the magic equivalent to a gun.

After all, the original guns were significantly inferior to the bows available at the time, but the difference between "it takes a few months to train in their use" against "it takes whole years" was enough of a game changer to make gun proliferate and be improved upon until they surpassed everything else. And it works very well with the "imperialism is the reason" for why other magic cultures are much smaller in number across the HP world.

This also matches well with canon; wandless magic isn't impossible there, but only a handful of people are capable of using it, and even those only in particular way. Furthermore, magic like Expelliarmus, the cruciatus or the killing curse needs to be "directed", for lack of a better word, in order to actually strike a target. Plus, using a wand would probably make magic more powerful; there are hint of this in how Snape was able to use Legilimency without a wand, but used one when training Harry. In fourth year Crouch mentioned that it wasn't enough to reach the correct emotional state and know the incantation to cast the killing curse, it also needed power that the fourth years wouldn't have; that implies that a certain amount of magical power could be a prerequisite for some of the more advanced magics. In that optic, it isn't unreasonable to believe that wielding a wand works as an amplifier, especially since the Elder Wand provides an example of a situation where a wizard knew the spell and was able to cast it with other wands, yet the spell didn't take, but when cast with the Elder Wand, it did. If all wands worked like that, to a much lesser extent, it'd go a long way to explain their proliferation.

So... yeah, I think the best approach would be "wands are the magical equivalent to guns"; after all, guns were the deciding factor in the successes of the imperialist powers, so the idea tracks with what @veekie said. And it's not like sword and longbows are any less lethal today than they were a thousand years ago (if anything, we're likely able to craft more deadly ones with our advanced technology), it's just that it's a useless hassle to waste the time required to train in the use of either since, if you're ever in need of a tool for killing, guns are sitting there, just waiting to be picked up. I think it would map to it really well.
 
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