That's nearly as annoying as when authors for no apparent reason refuse to use speech marks and your left trying to figure out where the speech is.

 

Bad enough in fanfiction, but it's just popped up in the book I'm reading at the moment as well :facepalm

 

I actually got a review for a story once where the 'reviewer' told me I WAS DOING IT WRONG when I changed paragraphs each time I changed speakers.

 

Stories where Harry does the chores in the house and cooks for the family despite being 4 years old. Or Naruto living by himself at the same age.

Seriously people wtf!?

 

This. Canon itself stretches credibility by having Harry cooking breakfast as an established routine at 10 years of age, but pushing it even earlier is ridiculous.

 

Dursley abuse in general. Yes, they were neglecting him and generally being an unfair bunch of douches, but abusive? (Then again - CutS).

 

I can handle reading an abusive Dursley story but i have read a few where Harry had a list of chores to do when he was six and one of them was to build a shed or something equally ridiculous and then gets 'beat until he passes out from pain so his magic can mysteriously heal him even though you find out later that 99.9% of his magic is blocked.'

That's another thing i hate, Harry's magic being 'blocked' and then when he gets his magic unblocked he gets all of these cool 'rare' ability's, bonds with a phoenix or Basilisk and is an instant occlumency master with an extinct or highly magical animagus form like a dragon that hasnt been seen in one thousand years :facepalm

People don't seem to want to write about how Harry comes into his power anymore because he can go to the bank and get instant fucking power boosts by getting the blocks that were on him removed, blocks that are always placed by, wait for it... Albus Dumbledore.
:fire

 

Abuse/Neglect is a very fine line.

Frying pan? Bulldog?

I had to crank my SoD-meter to overdrive+ to accept that the kid is as normal as he is.

 

^ I like credible stories that play into how his treatment at the Dursley's plays into a mental or social defect.

That said, I don't like stories that turn Harry into some type of manchild who acts like a 30 year old and a 5 year old in the same paragraph. These are usually bad stories anyway with superslash involving Snape, Draco or Voldemort (and sometimes combinations of all of those).


In a related note, I hate stories that portray the entire Slytherin house as a home for abused children as some type of device to get Harry sorted there or have him transferred into the house so that Snape can begin 'healing' him. Snape is a selfish git in canon, and while an AU can certainly reduce this, there's no way Snape gives Harry any more time than he gives the rest of his non-Draco Slytherins without either a personality transplant or making one of Harry's parents not James/Sirius/Remus. While I could see one or two children being ill-used by their parents or guardians (heck, Neville's uncle dropped him off a balcony!), I cannot stretch it to the entire house to the point where they all have individualized counseling sessions with Snape (and not a qualified mind-healer or FC).

 

Yes, I always find it funny stories where Harry is supposed to a 'genius' but all I see is an average adult in the body of a child. People don't really know the differences between intelligence, maturity, life experience or such.

Anyway another thing that annoys me is a scientific approach to magic. I will not argue the merits of doing that for a HPverse fiction because that is personal but what bothers me is that they are doing it wrong.

A scientific approach would not be saying that the levitation charm creates 'anti-gravity', it would be taking a group having them use the charm on different things, different distances, times, levels of focus tiredness, different wands, well you get the idea.

Science is based on progression of what happens, how it happens and then why it happens. You can't go backwards and expect things to make sense. Bringing any term of science based on purely non-magical events you give up on any hope of achieving anything.

The worst part is when they say magic is another form of energy as if that is a great conclusion. There must be over nine thousand defintions of energy many of which essentially state "If it exists then it is energy.", with definitions like that it is impossible to find something that can't be considered another form of it...

 

Speaking of depictions of Slytherin - and this is actually a peeve I have with the DH movie - fics where Slytherin is confirmed as the evil house. I mean, seriously McGonagall? Send the whole of Slytherin house to the dungeons? Wtf. If it's just "the evil house" why does it exist at all? Why isn´t being sorted into Slytherin instant expulsion? (Suddenly reminded of IP82's sinister fic).

Although kneejerk reactions against this are just as bad: all those "Slytherin was really misunderstood, we're really all big softies here in Slytherin" fics. Moderation, as with everything, is key. Why can't people write a varied house of complex characters, including people who are pleasant, friendly, intelligent, but also horribly racist?

...yeah. I don't know why I even bothered to ask that question.

Along similar lines, depictions of Hufflepuff where it really is the idiot house.

And yeah, what chrnno said. Without wishing to derail the thread massively, this is one of the problems I have with MoR. Harry (and by extension, the author) doesn't ever consider that his methods for discovering knowledge might be domain-specific, and may not apply in the wizarding world. And because the author's purpose is to bum those methods, the idea is never explored, when it could have been the most interesting part of the fic: Harry failing to apply the scientific method to magic.

 

I don't think that'd be interesting; I'd find it horrible. To each their own, I suppose...

Pretty much everything you say after this, I'm in full agreement with. I've spent many, many hours trying to find a cohesive way to interlink magic and science together in a way that is both believable and interesting. When people lazily try to slap the two together in much the manner you described, it drives me nutty. Science isn't just a thrown together assemblage of random ideas; it's the product of several millennia of the world's greatest thinkers and experimenters coming together to form a picture of the universe and its workings. Integrating the otherworldly concept of magic into it is not a quick or easy job.

Incidentally, while I was writing this, I came up with another idea: the thing wizards use when doing magic is the same thing that scientists call dark energy. This would kinda tie into Taure's theory (which I happen to agree with) that magic is something "out there" that wizards happen to call upon when performing a spell. Of course, I just came up with this a few minutes ago, so I haven't had the time to fully think about the ramifications of my idea, and I'm sure that by this time tomorrow, either I or someone reading this post will come up with an obvious way that my idea is bogus or stupid, and I'll discard it. But then again, that's the kind of thought that really goes into creating a working theory of magic: coming up with an idea, thoroughly investigate its implications, and discard it if it produces inconsistencies or is just plain silly.

Kinda going off my reply to Taure above, I'll admit that I haven't read any of MoR in months, and my memory of it is sketchy at best, but one of the reasons I defended it when others on DLP lambasted it was because it was one of the very few attempts I remember reading that tried to tie science and magic together in a good way. Honestly, without re-reading it, I couldn't say if it still holds up to my expectations, but when I was reading it, it seemed as if it were doing exactly what I wanted it to do, what I've been trying to do.

Wow, that post was a lot longer than I was intending it to be when I started writing it. I have a thesis I should be putting this effort into. Back to work.

 

Yeah... I think you've overstating the timescale here rather significantly.

Re: Dark energy... yeah, I don't think this ties in well with any of my ideas at all <_< I've always said a) there's an infinite "amount" of magic/magic can't be quantified at all b) magic breaks the rules of nature, not works with them. And anyway, I'm not sure if there is sufficient dark energy to explain the acts of magic like creation of large amounts of matter.

I think you missed chrnno's point a bit though, mknote. You're still talking about the kind of thing he dislikes: taking the body of knowledge that science has given us (mainly physics), and trying to explain magic in terms of it. Chrnno, as far as I can see, is saying that the correct scientific approach to magic wouldn't be approaching magic using our scientific knowledge and trying to reconcile the two, but rather to apply the scientific method to magic and create a new body of knowledge, distinct from the other sciences (physics, chemistry etc.), about magic, but derived from experiment.

 

I think I get what you're saying. Reminds me of Death Note to some extent; the investigation started out knowing nothing about Kira or the limits to his capabilities, but gradually started accumulating more and more knowledge about what could or couldn't be done with a Death Note. I would hesitate to call that science, though; I think it would be better to simply call it a "logic" that applies to whatever magic you're dealing with. Honestly, though, I'm not sure what that would entail beyond the postulation of random magical rules along the lines of Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration. Ideally, one would be able to find correlations between the various rules to find some greater consistency beneath, but that sounds like it would involve more world-building than anyone could possibly manage.

 

I don't think I am. Or are you arguing that Ancient Greece made no contribution to science? Archimedes lived 2,200 years ago, remember.

Meh. It isn't for everyone. I personally agree with some of your own theories (such as magic being an infinite "thing" of the universe, not something that's contained in oneself/"magical core"), but I disagree with a hell of a lot of it too (such as your b in the above quote, or the assertion that the strength of a wizard is all skill and there is no innate "power" to a wizard). As I said, to each their own.

Hmmm. Perhaps so. I think chrnno and I are talking about two different things, and I agree with the thing he's talking about, but I was talking about another. See, I think he's talking about the process of trying to figure out what magic is, while I'm talking about what it is. I think he has the idea of how to research it, i.e. using the scientific method, but the end result of what we would actually discover is more in line with what I was talking about.

Observe as well that science is very interrelated. Biology is heavily related to chemistry, which in turn is closely related to physics. Geology, too, is closely related to physics. Physics and astronomy are closely related enough that in many colleges (mine included) they're lumped into the same department. So if magic were to be subjected to the scientific method and thus (as you put it):

then a reconciliation between magic and the other sciences would not only be natural but mandatory. Obviously the sciences (primarily physics, as you noted) would have to change to fit this new understanding. But that's how science operates. Before relativity, astronomers noticed that Mercury's orbit was a little odd. Relativity fixed this, and our notion of physics changed. In much the same way, physics would have to change to accommodate magic. That's what I'm talking about.

My personal preference (and it is a preference, as there's relatively little canon evidence to strongly support any one theory of magic) is that magic would be able to be explained in large part by physics as we know it today, albeit with modifications where necessary (such as Transfiguration apparently breaking conservation laws). That's just my preference as a physicist; it feels neater dealing with something I have a somewhat firm grasp of, as opposed to something completely different from what I know.

 

That is exactly what I'm saying - at least in no meaningful way. Greek philosophy may have helped set the intellectual scene for science to occur, but a hell of a lot of different factors did that. If you're going to include all the social, military and economic factors which allowed science to come about in the first place as part of the history of science then you're going to bloat the idea ridiculously and end up including almost all of human history.

Far better to keep to science itself.

And on the topic of the unity of science: you overestimate the unity a fair amount. Oh, sure, there's ontological unity in so far as the same fundamental stuff that we talk about in physics makes up the things we talk about in biology.

But there's almost no epistemological unity - we have no ability to just take all of our knowledge of physics, add it together, and then end up with our knowledge of biology. Physics and physical chemistry is a bit of an exception, though an interesting one. In the words of Chomsky, in the case of physics and chemistry we're not dealing with the reduction of chemistry to physics (as commonly assumed) but rather the integration of the two. In the early 20th century, for example, it was physics that changed to match the findings of chemistry, not the other way around.

Hell, there's not even unity within the subjects. There are two forms of genetics, for example - Mendelian and molecular - and the two contradict each other. Medelian genetics cannot be reduced to molecular genetics (see Sex and Death, chapters 3-7), and thus chemistry and physics.

/philosophy of science.

 

That's exactly what I'm talking about! That's my point. You can't call physics complete if you don't take into account this vast "other" called magic; you need to reconcile the two because, in the end, you're trying to explain the universe, and you can't do that if you ignore part of the universe.

 

If Mendelian genetics doesn't mesh well with how the world actually works (i.e. chemical processes in cells) then it's just wrong and will be discarded.

 

Except it hasn't, and it won't be. It's all about suitable levels of generalisation. We have different explanations for different levels of generalisation, and the explanations don't always reduce to each other. Physics is what's "really" going on, but biology will never be done by giving extremely long explanations in terms of subatomic particles. It's an inappropriate level of generalisation and wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know.

Some information exists only on higher levels of generalisation. For example, the idea of biological function. If you stuck with just chemical and physical processes, you would never answer the question of a thing's function.

The two are already reconciled: they both exist within the same (imaginary) universe. You're talking about reconciling the explanations, so that we can give an explanation of one in terms of the other. I don't see why this should be a) possible or b) desirable. It certainly isn't with the other sciences.

 

I think I am hindered by only knowing high school biology, by my understanding is that while the pre-molecular biology approximation can be useful, and is much more convenient to work with than the (especially not yet fully mapped) chemical processes, whenever it contradicts the real chemistry it is wrong.

I think it's like using Newtonian mechanics instead of modern physics. We know it's wrong, but in many cases it is accurate enough and is much easier to work with. But whenever it contradicts modern physics it is wrong and modern physics is right. Real astronomical observations are better predicted by modern physics. If GPS was built without taking relativistic effects into account, it would not have worked, same with microchip lithography and many other "everyday" things that we use are impossible to build using only the Newtonian view of the world.

So if some inheritable trait is simple enough to be modeled by Mendelian genetics, you can use that and get a good enough result. But if the real world and your model disagree, the real world wins, and a model that better predicted the real world is "truer", though maybe not more useful (because it might be computationally unfeasible).

It's not like you can use the Mendelian model and the molecular biology model and get different answers and both would be "right". At most one of the answers would match the real world. The other answer would only be right inside its model, and would tell you more about the model than what it's modeling.

RE: reconciling physics with magic. In science, when the model encounters reality that contradict the model, the model gets updated and we move on. It's called progress.

In a world where magic is fact, if their muggles believe exactly what IRL physics believes, if a physicist found out about magic and was convinced it's not a hoax, he would say there is need to rewrite physics textbooks. The second law of thermodynamics is only an assumption. In that world, it would turn out to be false and somebody would get a Nobel prize. There is no need to try to explain magic using current physics. If magic is real, then current physics is just wrong and as soon as scientists can start doing experiments they'll change physics.

What does need reconciling is the changes to muggle history and magical society that we expect to have occurred because magic exists. Even if we say that there are rules and people mostly obey the rules, we must still face the fact that when faced with extinction, people resort to everything in their power, even if it's against the rules. So when some wizards found out that they and everyone they love will die unless they break the rules and use muggle weapons, some of them would have broken the rules, because some wizards are unscrupulous and/or desperate. When faced with starving children, some wizard would conjure/transfigure some silver/platinum/diamonds/prime divisors and sell them, without even breaking the statute of secrecy. The two economies do interact (Hermione's parents in Gringotts), so not affecting one another is impossible. Controlling all private transactions is impossible, and wizards can sell many things that do not reveal to the buyer that the seller can violate physics. Wizarding Britain is tiny. Its GDP is also tiny. Post-industrial revolution Britain has private individuals that can buy it outright. If anyone with access to real capital found out about magic, the effects would be far reaching.

I bet all my money that JKR did not know/understand the law of comparative advantage, but it is very real. I believe it will outlast the Standard Model of Physics. It would affect the world in such a way as to make the potterverse as we know it impossible.

This is fridge logic, but since it took the author a decade to finish the series, some readers encountered these problems before finishing, which detracts from the fun.