23 Things You Didn’t Think About When You Said You Want To Live In The Harry Potter Universe
1. They have confirmed, empirical evidence for the existence of souls. The general public is perfectly OK with the destruction of the soul as a form of punishment.
2. You could never really be sure if you’ve ever been a victim of a memory charm.
3. Love Potions were handled way too lightly by the characters for the most part, which is strange because Rowling even explored the scarier parts of them with Merope and Tom Sr.
You’d think that, knowing how they can be abused that way, love potions would be very very very heavily restricted and regulated, or banned outright.
– Anonymous
4. If Hieronymus Bosch was a wizard, the people / demons in his paintings would be alive, and the tortures would be real.
– wjbc
Amazon / Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
5. Two words.
Polyjuice prostitutes.
You know that girl you’ve got a crush on? Just find a single hair and some polyjuice potion and voila! Have a prostitute drink some polyjuice for an hour of fun with anyone. And you know there is a black market for that shit. Lockhart probably sells a few clippings a day for a thousand galleons a pop
– mepope09
6. Avada Kedavra = Abra Kadabra
The only spell that exists for the one purpose of killing, is also the spell that’s deeply ingrained in Muggle culture. Which means that the Killing Curse was used enough around Muggles that its butchered pronunciation is used as a general “magic” sounding phrase.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone
7. The sheer number of times poor Peter Pettigrew had to watch young Ron wank…
– Barsam37
8. Psycho wizard makes two portkeys, one out of a rock he chucks ino the ocean 5 miles out, and one out of a plastic ball he chucks into a ball pit at McDonalds or Chuck E. Cheese.
9. People seem to be fairly incapable of living between both worlds so you’re forced to abandon muggle friends and family or reject the wizarding world.
Except Hermione.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone
10. The danger that a wizard might go rogue and reveal magic to the Muggle’s military forces.
11. Slavery, forced segregation, and the subjugation and racism (specisim?) against sentient species is all taken as a matter of course.
Not the work of Dark Wizards: not the work of angry Muggles: but the work of normal, more-or-less good people.
It takes a Muggle born to even broach the fact that magically enslaving an entire species is kinda wrong.
12. Hagrid’s dad managing to impregnate Hagrid’s mom is a pretty horrible situation to think on.
It’s also apparently pretty easy to manipulate flying balls into chasing after a specific individual with the goal of shattering the bones in their body, so you could be minding your own business one day when BAM, giant ball to the spine.
– Solias
13. Some poor first year probably got crushed to death by the moving stairs.
14. People can teleport and become invisible at a moments notice. Based off the fact that people have mental illnesses, there was probably a problem with wizards/witches stalking people and I imagine there were lots of serial killers (besides the Death Eaters.)
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
15. That their world is dying.
Think about it. All of the great magicians are dead and ancient. Time Turners? Nobody knows how to make those anymore. A powerful magic whose methods have been lost to time. The Deathly Hallows, three items that turn well known laws of even magical physics on their heads, cannot be recreated using modern means. The three brothers were probably intelligent and powerful to create them, yet modern wizards find the idea so outlandish they consider them a fairy tale. There are even old magics, like the The Arch in the ministry, that nobody even knows what they are anymore. What purpose they may have served.
The pure blood lines are crumbling, falling back on old money and old blood to prop up their nobility. The segregation and racism deepen the gulfs and serve only to ensure that their world sinks deeper into disrepair. Wars flicker off and on, magic guarded jealously, and even among magical people there are those born without the spark. Squibs.
Certainly there are powerful wizards. Dumbledore was put forward as an example of such. But bear in mind that he also used the Elder Wand and still was no match for Voldemort. The creator of the Sorcerer’s Stone, Nicolas Flamel, opted to let the secret of its creation die with him. And maybe it’s that mentality of wizards, to jealously guard their secrets, that have led to a world that is slowly dying around them.
In addition they are stagnant. They don’t know how to grow. As a society they don’t know how to advance. For the most obvious example let’s look at Snape and Potions.
Snape was a school child, around Harry’s age, yet he was a prodigy. He made vast and sweeping improvements to the art of potions and tried his hand at inventing spells. He was a remarkable young person who was revolutionizing the way that Potions are made and the methods used. He was improving on methods that could have conceivably been in place for hundred of years.
Fast forward all those years. Snape is now Potions Master at the top school in the world. He has political clout and is close with Dumbledore. It has been decades since he was a child and he has likely turned the art of Potion Making into something unrecognizable from what it was only a short few decades previous. Surely the children are learning the Snape Method right?
Wrong.
The children are still learning the same old methods from the same old textbooks. And Snape is forced to teach those same old inferior methods because that’s the way it’s done.
16. Everyone in those schools would be utterly incapable of functioning in the normal world to which they return for some reason, possessing as they do absolutely no life skills.
– SylverV
17. Sudden apparition of friends or family while fapping.
18. Magic is a clean, renewable source of energy. We could end pollution, oil dependence, etc.
But screw us muggles. Wizards are too busy playing broomball to end global warming.
– gnujack
19. No privacy at all.
Like The Marauder Map which is an enchanted map of Hogwarts, one that shows every inch of the castle and surrounding grounds. People can guess what you are doing at any time
– Naweezy
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows
20. That Aguamenti creates water out of nothing.
Think of all the people dying of thirst in the world are only dying because a wizard can’t be bothered to create some water.
I won’t get into the fact that the wizard could then become a de-facto ruler of said nation by controlling the water source for the country afterward.
21. I find it very difficult to believe that Tom Riddle was the only person to ever come up with horcrux soul manipulation.
I would think that many like-minded psychotic serial killer types would be terrorizing the wizarding world with immortal souls trapped in objects, sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
Tom was silly, creating clever puzzles and riddles to … destroy his everlasting soul(s)?
A more sinister wizard would split once and bury that shit 250 feet below a tree, good luck finding that horcrux Harry fucker.
Reign of terror everlasting.
22. Not exactly horrifying, or even of any real consequence, but one thing that constantly bothers me is the complete disregard for Muggle “technology” that has improved.
• They still use a steam engine train. Perhaps it runs on magic, but there has to be some unused First Great Western coach that they can jerry rig to run on magic.• Gas lamps and candles. They’re lighting an entire castle with hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of candles and gas lamps. Even in the time Harry Potter was set, incandescent light bulbs existed. Don’t get me started on the fact that their wands can produce an LED-type light that “floods” a room with light. But no. Candles.
• This is the one that bothers me the most: QUILLS. They’re constantly buying bottles of ink, snapping their quills, and spilling ink all over their parchment (OH YEAH. PARCHMENT SCROLLS.) while Bic creates a perfectly good ball-point for 50p.
23. I don’t want to live in a world where a full grown man can’t defeat a one-year-old infant. Why on earth didn’t Voldemort just walk over and oh, I don’t know, push him out the window?
