Same feeling I get from watching a good hockey game that ends up being a shootout. Only worse, like if the first penalty and following goal results in a won game. In the first period.
To quote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Just. Buy. A. Clock.
Counter point :- (not to do with American sports – they are ridiculous)
imagine you’re watching a quidditch game where one side has an overwhelmingly good set of chasers. I mean unbelievably good. Far better than the other side. Within five minutes they are 50 points up, and another 30 minutes later they are 250 points up. There is literally no chance of the other side catching them.
Do you really want to sit and watch that? It’s like the Brazil - Germany game. After a while you would just be “Stop – you are hurting them too much. It’s getting embarrassing and we are all now going to leave because even the home team wants you to stop”
At least with the snitch it means there is a chance that it’ll be evened out.
Another counter point: it’s a book for children.
And another again: “In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone…”
I’m sorry, but I hate this excuse. Bad writing is bad writing. Hand-waving away something that just straight-up doesn’t make sense because it’s “for children” is lazy. Also, saying a 30-second throwaway gag on a show-within-a-show is the same as the thousands of pages of YA lore in the series Rowling spent over a decade writing is obviously a false equivalency.
It’s worse than that though. The parking lot frog adds a huge, but not impossible, score to your team if you catch it AND it instantly ends the game.
So even if one team is absolutely crushing the other, it’s not actually going to even things out unless it is in a very specific range of uneven matches.
Being so overwhelmingly outclassed makes a neat sort of metagame about preventing the parking lot frog from being caught. Though the frog is apparently hard enough to catch even once that defending it is sort of besides the point. Even if the frog hunt suddenly has a second dynamic, it’s still taking place pretty much completely outside of the view of the audience.
Turns out she wasn’t great at designing an actual game. Among other things…
The snitch isn’t completely out of view of the audience though. And I think that’s kind of the point. The audience can see every fight between seekers for the snitch. This happens at the world cup, and at the matches between Slytherin and Gryffindor in the books. A good set of chasers and beaters can be countered by a good seeker and a good keeper.
Ya I’m curious Lil M @[email protected] about how you imagine the typical seeker flight paths in context of the stadium, obviously no “wrong” answer :)
I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but I seem to recall them describing the snitch as ‘basically invisible’ and the players flying under the bleachers and into the stratosphere in pursuit of it. Those might be exceptions, maybe the frog only sometimes wanders out into the parking lot.
so … at least one vote for pro-frog
Conversely, literally every other game becomes meaningless. Catching the snitch gains SO many points. You could literally just play defense and snitch support, and never try and score.
Remember you also have to catch the snitch to end the game. Otherwise it would just go forever
“Plot device, Mr. Frodo, plot device.”
This is what happens when an author designs a sport where the protagonist is the single most important player.
Specifically, when a hack of an author designs a sport.
Those books are wonderful, and my children delight in them, even as they both outgrow being the original target audience
The books are average. I read them all, I enjoyed them. The warm feelings of an ‘orphan’ finding friends and a new family combined with having a fun time in a magical setting carry the series. The actual writing doesn’t amount to blasé. She built a world that seems fun. She built a world that falls apart with gentle pokes.
The thing is, the seeds of something great are right there.
Ditch the stupid seeker role, and you have a game that’s both entertaining and narratively useful.
Harry could have learned how to be a team player, and eventually a leader.
Instead Rowling wanted Harry to be super special boy in the laziest way possible.
You don’t have to ditch it, just make it so it’s not a guaranteed win under normal circumstances. Make it so the snitch isn’t released until a certain amount of time has passed, or points have been scored. And instead of having it be worth a ton of points, have it be worth a small enough amount that it could make a difference in a close game but not the only deciding factor. Then it’s a strategic position. A position that requires timing instead of just speed.
The mechanic of catching the snitch immediately ending the game is a pretty good one, and there’s several ways you could go about it.
-
Adds no points to either side: you want to catch it when your team is up, but if you find it when your team is down, you want to misdirect the other team’s Seeker
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Adds a small number of points to your side: you want to catch it when your team is within striking distance of a win
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Adds a small number of points to the opposite side: you only want to catch it when your team is up significanty
My favorite would be a random or rotating points penalty. Like say every 3 minutes the points given to each side upon grabbing the snitch is randomized. It still allows for that stupid main character syndrome special boy causing the win thing, but it doesn’t completely break the strategy of the game.
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Just make it so that catching the snitch ends the game. As in, the scores from either side get fixed. This way the losing team would have an incentive to stop the winning team from getting it, but themselves wouldn’t be interested in doing so. It’s not game breaking, just another angle.
It’s honestly hilarious how much being the seeker isolates Harry from the rest of the team. He doesn’t have any team plays besides the occasional interaction with the beaters. It would have been so much more interesting if the position were removed, the game lasted a set amount of time, and Harry was a chaser.
Yeah, that’s just bollocks. (No offence) (okay a little offence).
Harry had already saved the world when he was eighteen months old. He was already a super special boy given THE ENTIRE MAGICAL WORLD KNEW HIS NAME before he did.
So the idea that making him a seeker was a way to make him special?
That’s just crap.
I also feel like half the reason he won all the damn time is because he literally just had the best broom in existence for most of the matches from his rich godfather. He’s also annoying af with all his angst in the later books (especially OotP) with “nooooo my friends don’t understand meeeeee I can’t talk to anyoneeeee lemme just be an impulsive idiot”.
How did they get rich anyway?
Harry’s grandfather is supposed to have invented Sleekeazy’s hair spray / potion or something to tame people’s hair since the Potters have crazy hair lol. It’s such a cartoonish reasoning.
It’s J.K. Rowling. I expect nothing and she still dissapoints hahaha
Rowling had some really sinister cultural programming embedded in her brain that comes out in these books, regardless of the trans stuff that surfaced later. The entire magical governing system is hugely corrupt, based on family wealth, and obviously full of fascists, but the focus of the books was that there were bad actors abusing the system, rather than the system being broken from the start.
You could argue that’s done for realisms sake, and sure maybe it is, but if the characters never actually meaningfully tackle those issues then you’re re-enforcing complicity for the sake of it, rather than enacting change in a corrupt system when you have the power and ability to do so.
Umbridge feels like she was based on a woman Rowling personally knew. Don’t know much about Rowling past but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a weird messed up childhood
That is exemplified specifically by the “rich godfather buys Harry Potter the bestest broom stick” scenario.
Like, I’m pretty sure in Book 2(?) it’s a big deal that Evil Lucius Malfoy evilly outfits the Slytherin team with new broomsticks. Evil when Lucius does it because he’s evil, but okay when Sirius does it because he’s good.
Just like how slavery was bad when Lucius Malfoy did it to Dobby, but okay when Harry had Kreacher as a slave (who he also treated like shit, but it’s fine, Rowling wrote him to be evil and deserve it anyway)
Just like her worldbuilding, morality is whatever Joanne thinks is most convenient for the story she wants to tell.
Ugh yeah the way Sirius treated Kreacher annoyed me so much. Apparently it was completely fine for Harry to have him as a slave as long as he gave him some locket and made poor brainwashed Kreacher feel like he was the best treated slave ever.
JK Rowling’s lack of critical thinking is glaringly obvious in everything she has ever written.
There’s an old 4chan post about J.K. Rowling and how they only believe in protecting the status quo system.
It very neatly describes the way liberals see the world and political struggle. Lots of people complain about the anti-climactic ending, but really I don’t think it could any other way. I’d like to imagine that there’s some alternate universe where Rowling actually believed in something and Harry was actually built up as the anti-Voldemort he was only hinted as being in the beginning of the books. Where he’s opposes all the many injustices of the wizarding world and determines to change their frequently backwards, insular, contradictory society for the better, and forms his own faction antithetical to the Death Eaters and when he finally has his showdown with Voldy. Harry surpasses by adopting new methods, breaking the rules and embracing change and the progression of history. While Voldemort clings to an idyllic imaging of the past and the greatest extent of his dreams is to become the self-appointed god of a eternally stagnant Neverland. Harry has embraced the possibility of a shining future and so can overcome the self-imposed limitsVoldemort could never cross, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated by this.
But that would require a Harry that believed in something, and since Rowling is a liberal centrist Blairite that doesn’t really believe in anything, Harry can’t believe in anything. Harry lives in a world drought with conflict and injustice, a stratified class society, slavery of sentient magical creatures, the absurd charade the wizarding world puts upto enforce their own self-segregation, a corrupted and bureaucracy-choked government, rampant racism, so on and so forth But Harry is little more than a passive observer for most of it, only the racism really bothers him (and then, really only racism against half-bloods). In fact, when Hermione stands up against the slavery of elves, she’s treated as some kind of ridiculous Soapbox Sadie. For opposing chattel slavery. In the end. the biggest force for change is Voldemort and Harry and friends only ever fight for the preservation and reproduction of the status quo. The very height of Harry’s dreams is to join the aurors. a sort of wizard FBI and the ultimate defenders of the wizarding status quo. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the big instigators of change and Harry never quite gets to Voldy’s level. Harry doesn’t even beat Voldemort, Voldemort accidentally kills himself because he violated some obscure technicality that causes one of his spells to bounce back at him.
And this is really the struggle of liberals, they live in a world fraught with conflict, but aren’t particularly bothered by any of it except those bit that threaten multicultural pluralism. They see change, and the force behind that change, as a wholly negative phenomenon. Even then, they can only act within the legal and ideological framework of their society. So. for instance, instead of organizing insurrectionary and disruptive activity against Trump and the far-right, all they can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot he is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout. It won’t work, it will never work, but that’s the limit of liberalism just as it was the limit of Harry Potter.
Fuck me if that doesn’t describe the issues in those books perfectly.
She isn’t a bad author, just a bad person. The reason I regret reading her work isn’t because of the work itself…
She’s not a bad person, she has an opinion that’s different from yours
Funnily I’m not very fond opinions that entail treating me and my loved ones like dangerous subhumans
You’re on the wrong site to have garbage viewpoints like this.
That opinion is “this group of people is worth less than another group,” so yes she’s a bad person
Perhaps, but I posit that her opinions run objectively bad.
Having an opinion that people don’t deserve to have rights for being who they are does in fact make you a bad person.
She can’t keep consistent with her dates and how long ago things were
She had good ideas but is a bad author
Not wanting to defend Rowling, since she’s an evil and hateful person, but there’s many great authors who fall foul of basic arithmetic. I would argue that they are completely separate skills; TV Tropes has a good list. (Also, I’d argue that most of her good ideas were taken from someone else.)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WritersCannotDoMath
It’s not nearly as bad as the basketball example anyways, because the other teams players are having to play the normal game, AND try to fuck over the opponent trying to catch the snitch. If you ignore the scrawny kid and let him catch the game ender, it’s your own fault.
Now that’s a quote I’ve not heard in a long time.
Bless me little hobbit feets, Mr. Frodo!
Just ending the game would have been a good way to implement the snitch, tbh. It would have more strategy, more reasons to block the other seeker when you’re behind. If there really had to be extra points, it should have been worth 10 points or something.
Yeah that’s the reason quidditch is a dumb fucking sport. You can be wiping the floor with the other team, but if their guy gets lucky and catches the parking lot frog, it’s all for nothing. They’ve won despite having played an objectively much worse game.
Yeah, I usually go down this same thought process every time I re-read the books. I usually end up at, “Yup, she went out of her way to avoid Quidditch by using feebler and feebler excuses every book.” It’s a shame, because it really could have wound up an exciting part of the series if it was more thought out.
It was worth 150 points. The equivalent of 15 goals. Do you mean 100 points and re-release it and continue playing?
Just let Dumbledore divide the points between the teams like for the house cup. Totally fair.
The House Cup was always much dumber than Quidditch imo
I appreciated that after a few years they all stopped caring in the least about the house cup, and it went to other houses as well. It was hacky.
The house points are supposed to be displayed by large hourglasses with rubies, emeralds, etc. falling down or floating up. One billion making their way through the hourglass over the course of months? decades? would be hilarious.
for a few days.
Imagine if they were trying to catch the frog on the court though
A court that was like ten times bigger, everyone’s flying, tackling is legal if not encouraged, and there’s two people on each team who are there to play dodgeball with bocci balls, not basketball
Yeah, but that’s the exciting bit. I don’t mind the idea of catching the Snitch as a means of ending the game, even with a marginal point reward. In a close game, this creates an incentive for a behind-but-gaining team to deliberately delay catching the Snitch until they are within range of a win. But - as written - the game is just the “Harry Potter Is The Hero” microcosm. Nothing anyone else does seems to matter.
Incidentally, this is replicated in the worst parts of the series. The early books give the supporting cast a huge role to play in solving the school mystery, thwarting the villains, and improving the school. Latter books - particularly as you get into the Horcruxes (tell me you’ve played D&D without telling me you’ve played D&D, Rowling) - make so much of the supporting cast irrelevant bordering on disposable. By the last book, Rowling is just knocking off side characters casually.
The unexciting part is that the obvious best strategy would be to ignore the regular part of quidditch and just focus entirely on helping their seeker get the snitch and shutting down the opposing seeker.
Iirc you can’t interfere with the seekers, plus if you don’t defend and play, the other team just scores more than 150 points and wins when your team gets the snitch.
1 goal is 10 points
1 snitch is 150 points
You’re going to leave your goals unguarded? No, you’ll have a goalie.
You’re going to let the other beaters just bash bludgers at your team? No, you’ll have your own beaters.
Best you could do is pull your chasers to help catch the snitch.
You’ll give up your entire offense and defense
So can my 3 chasers score 15 times against your goalie trying to guard 3 rings by themselves before your 4 seakers can catch a snitch. My seeker could even catch the snitch or just play snitch D.
I’d put my money on the 3 chasers
Best strategy would be to have 4 chasers and rotate one out every once in a while to search for the snitch. But being able to score 10 points going 4v3 would be powerful
My 10 year old just got his hands on the monsters book for d&d from the library. He was reading it today and pointing out how much Harry Potter monsters and characters which his sister loves, are based on d&d.
The frog:
hop… hop… hop… 🐸Harry:
SECTUMSEMPRA! 🪄
It might be because I was young when I read Harry Potter, but the whole series was magical for me exactly because of stuff like this.
As I recall the story, Rowling designed that feature of the game specifically to annoy her sport-loving husband. It’s a feature of a fictional sport designed in spite. So really, it performs it’s function admirably…
Well that just makes me like her a tiny little bit.
Or – you know – dislike her a little bit less.
Doesnt that diminish the world building? I know it did for me. As an adult, I cant appreciate HP the same way I did as a kid. I can still appreciate Lotr just fine, as an example. She should have put her differences aside for a better story, but shes not better than that anyway.
What world building? Rowling’ wizarding world is the epitome of nothing makes sense and can only be explained by “a wizard did it”.
Hogwarts was built in the 10th century, but uses far more modern Muggle technology for their sewage and sanitary system rather than some established form of teleportation/relocation.
The economy is a joke as they use fixed exchange rates between gold and silver can be abused for arbitrage trades with the Muggle world. It can only be explained by all wizards and witches stopping their primary education as ten-year-olds but even then it would take only one to figure it out and break the system.
Why on earth use owls to carry letters and packages? The practicality of using owls over other birds aside, why not use established instant transportation methods like the floo network? The only explanation we get is that the floo network and apparition are blocked in Hogwarts but does this one school dictate the rules for the entire world? And even then, wouldn’t it be easier to set up a post office in an exempted area or just outside Hogwarts?
I could go on as there are countless other flaws and then just as many again once you consider the implications of the time turner. Having a sport with nonsense rules is one of the lesser issues when the world is inherently broken
Really, I couldn’t stay interested past Dumbledore’s death knowing there was like a hundred ways he might not actually be dead. The whole deathly hallows thing even acknowledged that, it’s good that Rowling very intentionally chose not to do a C.S.Lewis there. But the problem was the inherent brokenness of the world, which was just unsuitable for a serious story.
For anyone who enjoys this type of deconstruction, check out the old but gold fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Fun read, very high quality.
The economy is a joke as they use fixed exchange rates between gold and silver can be abused for arbitrage trades with the Muggle world. It can only be explained by all wizards and witches stopping their primary education as ten-year-olds but even then it would take only one to figure it out and break the system.
This is almost verbatim a plot point in the fic. It takes the rational ‘Harry James Potter Evans-Verres’ (the alternate reality protagonist) all of three seconds in Gringotts to devise an infinite money glitch, among other ways to break the system, though he still faces the obstacles of being a child.
The theme explores how Wizards take advantage of clearly superior muggle technology, but magically delude themselves into a false sense of superiority that crushes intellectual curiousity at a young age and isolates and inducts muggleborn wizards into a cult of ignorance.
It’s hard to learn and respect newtonian physics and thermodynamics when your brooms operate on Aristotleian physics (point forward = go forward) and you violate thermodynamics by the age of six.
Now imagine trying to learn arbitrage rates when you’re taught to fly by age 11, and can instead choose to spend the next 7 years learning how to break reality with your voice and mind. Then graduate wizarding school at age 18, never to pursue education again
for some reason.because most teenagers learn how to teleport at will and how much education do you need beyond that?
She does seem to be mainly powered by spite.
I respect that, but I hate the fans who love it, it’s like they have never played or watched anything competitive before.
Monopoly was also designed to annoy people, yet somehow people play it hoping it will be fun.
It is fun when you’re winning and it’s turned into a drinking game seeing how many rounds everyone else can last. It usually ends because everyone ends up piss drunk and wanders off.
Man, it sounds fun until I consider drunken Monopoly rage…
Children play it for fun because they get to play make-believe about money, play the banker, etc. Just handling fake money makes it fun to them because they are interested in the world on that level. The game itself is not fun to anyone, and I don’t think adults ever actually play it without children…
Last I played was as an adult with 3 other friends. To make it tolerable we had a rule that, on landing on someone else’s property, we could either pay up or drink a shot of rum. Mistakes were made.
I used to and still play with my friends over and what we do is save the game state in writing for the properties, status cards, money, houses/hotels and we use rubber bands to keep games going for years.
New people mean new game, same people we just continue the last state
Or they did, didn’t grasp the game, and it felt entirely arbitrary and boring, like that game of quidditch.
It’d work better if he only caught it once, like if it were a one in a million it’d balance better and represent the “hope against all odds” kinda device that i thought it was. But Harry catching the bloody thing every third game ruins it.
Iirc a game of quidditch doesn’t end until the snitch is caught. I believe one game lasted months
I believe one game lasted months
Ah, so a typical match of tennis
Really, I thought they were timed or something? I thought catching the snitch ended the game, but was not the only thing that could end the game?
They actually say a game once went for months because nobody caught it, and they had to keep switching players out to sleep. Which now that I think about it, how did they not have players on the bench…
What the hell’s the point of everything else in the game then? I thought people were scoring points and stuff. Why isn’t everyone just going after the golden snitch?
If everyone was trying to get the snitch on team a, team b would just get constant empty net goals and rack up a huge lead.
Since you still get 10 points per goal, if you can get a 16 goal lead on the opposing team, then you can win even if the snitch is caught by the opposing team. So not leaving an empty goal + having to deal with the bludgers (which can attack your seeker) then you suddenly don’t have as much resources for the snitch.
Additionally the game can be ended by mutual agreement between the teams, so a blowout in scoring can result in an effective surrender/resignation of the other team.
It’s actually an interesting mechanic when you think it through, since it means a pretty delicate balance of team resources need to be spent between seeking/assisting the seeker, defending, and having the ability to score in the case that the other team focuses too heavily on the snitch.
Delicate my ass. Put two chasers on defense, a chaser on snitch finding duty, and a beater dedicated entirely to hospitalizing the opposing seeker. The 3 on defense just need to park their asses in the goals, and as long as you either find the snitch first or concuss the other seeker, you win. Your second beater can move as necessary.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that there are minutia rules in place that would prevent or discourage disengaging play.
Similar to icing rules or offsides in hockey and soccer, or how players can’t enter the crease without the puck in hockey, goaltending rules in basketball, or pass interference and holding in American football.
Every sport is filled with rules like that in order to encourage dynamic and engaging play and I’m willing to bet we don’t know those rules for the same reason nobody poops it’s boring and not relevant to the story.
Besides you can counter that play by running a light defense and heavy attack on the opposing seeker, since defending against one chaser will be significantly easier, or having the seeker come off of snitch duty in a power play like scenario, making a 4 man offense with both beaters attacking the chasers acting as defenders (who would get demolished since they parked at the goal, keepers can’t get hit, but the chasers are just psuedo keepers in this scenario), that would allow you to dunk on the now hamstrung opposing team.
I think every sport seems stupid or broken until you put tweaks on the rules.
Edit: I just saw your play involved no offense, which means the entire opposing team’s offense can attack the goal as a counter, effectively making a 6 (or 7 if the keeper gets involved and they go open net) v 4, which makes it incredibly likely that the attacking team can just massively out score the opposing team, so your team would either have to draw back, or get extremely lucky and catch the snitch before the score snowballs. It could be an effective strategy, but it would for sure make you lose games against teams that have a stronger focus on scoring vs seeking.
That’s the point of the post.
Because then Harry isnt the constant hero saving everyone all the time.
it would be fine if the snitch gave maybe 50 points instead of 150. Then a significantly better team could push their opponents to end the game to safe face, or get them to try to regain points before being back in race to win.
Well that’s just silly. I’ll keep my head cannon in place, lol.
Adding also that canonically there have been games where the snitch is caught but that team still loses.
It would work if it was just an end timer, not deciding the game. So it’s at a semi random moment when the game can end and scores are final.
Harry catches the snitch almost EVERY game. I think the only game he ever played where he didn’t catch it was one where he was attacked by dementors and fell off his broom.
If i was the opposing captain, I’d have half the team just fucking with harry. We’d call him “the git who lived” out of pure resentment for his talent.
Now that I’ve coined the term, I can’t believe Fred and George never called him that.
“Oh no, I caught the snitch when we were 160 points behind” said no one ever except for that one time in the books and even then it just makes zero fucking sense.
The game doesn’t end until the snitch is caught.
In a league situation in the event of the same number of wins, the largest points difference comes first.
I.e. it is strategically useful to end a losing game as quickly as possible.
Actually that happened twice, once at the world cup where it made zero sense and once at Hogwarts, where it did make sense, because even though Gryffindor lost catching the snitch kept them in the house cup which is based off point differential
It just leads to such utterly contrived scenarios where the winning team isn’t the one who catches the snitch. If it was something like 30 points and didn’t end the game and you could catch it multiple times it would be better I think. It would be interesting to see team compositions that vary. Maybe some teams forgo scoring with the quaffle and focus only on scoring with snitch catches.
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It’s a metaphor that most people fight about the wrong things in life. They should know better because they saw somebody win before, but they ignore it.
it is almost as if HP movies were trash & retarded …
They are actually books 📕
Meh, point stands
I thought this was exactly the point, they make fun of the muggles but it’s their society which is completely bonkers
It would differ from town to town - more southern games would feature a lubed hog, in Philly they have to catch a chicken, in Florida they have to seduce a gator, etc.
All the drunk Florida fans at the tailgate will be seducing gators anyway.
Seems unfair on the ref to have to sort them out.
