Can someone explain the hate behind magical cores? Is it because more stories featuring this are cliche ridden messes or just people don't like the idea? I find it to be useful to quantify how much magic a person has, like stamina.

 

First, I'm sure you can find plenty of topics about this if you use the search function of this board. I suggest using it, often.

As for your question, one of my personal reason is that it's putting an arbitrary shackle upon your character to create conflict for author who are too lazy to create it otherwise. As if that wasn't enough, it also restrict a character from the moment of their birth ("Sorry brah, you'll never getting to Dumbledore level no matter how much time you put in your studies...you just don't have the magic!"). The only fic I've seen doing this and not completely sucking is the Saving Connor Series.

 

Magical cores, bruh? How about no?

Magical cores are an interpretation of magic that stands in direct contradiction to canon. It's the easy way out for writers who aren't willing or able to work within the framework established by JKR. While I'm not a purist (sometimes terms like greater/lesser power are useful in fanfiction and in my own writing), I largely agree with Taure's interpretation of HP magic.

 

Most (bad) writers use larger and smaller magical cores as a lazy way to make characters more powerful and skip magical training. It's normally used to allow Harry to brute force his way into powerful/impressive magic and is normally tied up into manipulative!Dumbledore putting bindings onto Harry's core or some rubbish.

That said, I kind of like the idea that some people are inherently more powerful that others. It's like how some people are simply born smarter, or born with long legs for running, or the right physique for weightlifting. The world isn't fair and some people get the lucky roll of the dice.

That doesn't however mean that you can fully utilise that inherent ability with no effort on your part, which is where most magical core fics fall flat. Far too many of these fics go "hurr, Harry you can do a Patronus because your super powerful, not because you put loads of effort into it and studied your hardest!". It's used as a cheap shortcut so Harry can have an epic battle with Voldemort/Dumbldore/both of them without any decent plot work.

Just don't pretend it's canon.

 

It should be noted, Download, that my interpretation of canon magic doesn't exclude some people being inherently more powerful than others. Indeed it embraces it. The key, however, is that it does not view this as a simple predicate like eye colour. Rather, there are numerous factors which go into how magically powerful a person is, factors which can be summed up more or less with the word "character". The way you think, the knowledge and beliefs you possess, your experiences, habits, etc all have a real magical "footprint". Some of those factors will in turn be influenced by genetic/neurological factors. To the extent that generally a person's character doesn't change fundamentally, or does so only very slowly over a long period of time, a person's magical footprint, encompassing their magical strengths and weaknesses, is fixed.

Moreover it's not so much a case as a person being more powerful in general, because you can be more powerful in one area of magic and weaker in another, depending on your natural predispositions (again, dependant on character).

That said, as character can change, this version of inherent magical power is not completely fixed. But then neither is intelligence in real life, even though genetic factors are strongly influential on intelligence. A person who neglects their intelligence and doesn't exercise their mind or has a poor education will not be as intelligent as they could have been. Even the food you eat can negatively effect your brain development and thus your intelligence. And of course any kind of brain damage can change your intelligence, just as a significant life event could change a person's character and thus their magical presence.

-----------------

To turn to the OP, there are numerous reasons why I dislike magical cores. To be clear, when I say magical cores, I am primarily referring to the idea that a wizard has a quantifiable source of magic which, like physical energy, is used up by casting spells and thus depletable.

My biggest problem with magical cores is that it means wizards can run out of magic. Not only is this completely uncanonical, it also does not make sense to me within the HP world. Having magic is an essential feature of being a wizard: a wizard running out of magic is like a Muggle running out of Muggleness. Does Vernon have a Muggle core with which he fuels his Muggleness? Further, wizarding society depends on wizards being able to cast magic all day every day, as they use magic casually, to complete everyday tasks.

Another problem I have with magical cores is that they make magic too simple. A single source of energy which has a single numerical value associated with it (whether or not wizards are aware of that value), which fuels all magic like petrol in a car. It's boring. Magic is a technology analogue in the HP world. You have to go to school and study to use it. Knowledge and academic study directly correlates with wizarding power. There's a government department dedicated to studying magic. Magical theory should be at least as complex as its Muggle analogues.

I would be fine with it if someone wrote an AU in which "magical core" referred to a kind of complex magical-biological system, with analogues for organs and tissues, blood, lymph, hormones, etc, and if wizards had only partial understanding of this system and studied it to understand it better, and if it was suitably complex, with numerous factors affecting not only power but also having different types of powers which interact in complex ways and which influence spellcasting in a more interesting manner than 1 to 1 fuel. But they don't.

A third problem I have with magical cores is that I find wizarding conflict to be more interesting if it is determined by the application of magic. As Scrimgeour said in HBP: the problem is, the other side has magic too. In a magical core scenario, conflict is resolved by either one person being more powerful than the other, or one person running out of magic before the other. Dull. No complexity. Magical conflict is so much more interesting when its outcome depends on how different characters use and apply magic, which shows a lot more about their character, and allows for far more elegant and interesting conflicts than merely "value A is bigger than value B, value A wins". In the no-cores scenario, winning a duel becomes more about outsmarting your opponent in the way you use magic.

My final problem with magical cores is more general, and reflects the fact that they treat magic like a form of physical energy which is expended to do work in changing the physical world. That's not how HP magic works.

It's a nod to physics that tries to fool you into thinking that magic could possibly be compatible with actual physics by making it seem that there were some rules with the thinnest possible similarities. But of course HP magic and physics are equally incompatible regardless of whether you give magic some rules that are vaguely reminiscent of physics.

 

I wonder what percentage of your posts is you explaining your general, and thoroughly justified, distaste for magical cores... I also feel like you must be getting really quick at typing out the explanations. You must have run through most permutations of the explanation by now. You are a very patient man Taure

 

Nah, he just cut and pastes it.

 

I honestly think that Taure probably has a better understanding of how HP magic works than JKR does.

 

Remember old Taure Memes thread? I do;

 

If you want to include magic cores in a fic there is no reason not to. It can work, if it's well written. Much like basically every other potential plot point there is, of you write it well there aren't any issues.

Cores aren't canon, but plenty of things that aren't canon are accepted by readers. And the better the writing, the more folk will accept it.

 

You could write Nobel worthy and I still wouldn't read it.

Some wells are throughly poisoned.

 

Name one fanon thing that is good.

 

The Wastelands of Time.

 

Magical Familiars? Come on, that fanon thing unleashed many Hedwig-centric fics

 

I disagree some ideas are and always will be shit, it's true that the story can still be good with cliche ideas if the other stuff is excellent but it will be good despite the terrible cliches like Soul Bond, Harem, God like power (still haven't read even one passable story with these cliches) and not because of it.

Wastelands of Time is not even Harry Potter anymore not one single thing even resembles the HP world and I think even Joe would agree that the characters are boring one dimensional cardboards (maybe not Harry, still didn't like him one bit but I understand why others liked him).

 

Joe is an exception, I think

Magical Cores are just a way for people used to other magic systems to force in a mana system into HP. It's lazy, incompatible with the Potterverse and is one more thing that tries to mugglify the wizarding world.

 

You mean, you don't?

 

I love mana bars. They're delicious.