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Chapter Text

The fanfiction and forum game; or Why Blaming the Writer is like Godwin's Law:

As with many a fandom, fans of Harry Potter argue in forums and social media hotspots over inconsistencies and interpretations, often leading to frustration as they consider different sources as authoritative.

We're all playing a game, but the rules aren't clear- in fact most people don't realize that it's a game in the first place.

It's a game of fill-in-the-empty-spaces. The world of Harry Potter is a three-dimensional jigsaw of great complexity, whose known pieces were originally provided solely from Harry's viewpoint. Even the author felt trapped by that limitation, to the point that she added scenes in the later books to inform the reader in ways Harry could never have known. She broke her own rules right there, but she was trying to build a structure to get to the shape and height she considered her destination, in seven interlocking sections. She was not trying to build the perfect tower, just one stable enough to reach the view at the end. Other authors play for the stable tower- you can tell because you get bored when they give you ugly but seemingly necessary pieces of the jigsaw to consider.

So back to our game- to tell our own stories using the existing jigsaw pieces to start readers off. The problem arises when we note that even some of the original pieces don't fit together very well. To make up for that we might shift the existing piece a little further away and come up with a bridging piece (fanon) that fits between two or more pieces. A bridging piece made well enough would be used by others once they'd seen it (read it in a story or seen it mentioned on a forum) and some of them were assumed to be part of the original puzzle because of that near-perfect fit. Most only realised the difference when they took a look at the original collection of pieces and realised that the bridge pieces were missing the serial numbers.

Where we get into trouble- JKR handed out other pieces later on or outside the editorial oversight in hopes of adding aesthetic strength to the structure, or even to take it a little higher. Some of them were pieces she later used in the books, but sometimes the final version of the pieces given early ended up a different shape.

Then came the movies, the supplementary books, the video games and Pottermore. More pieces, but not always placed in a way that fit with the original, and often had a horrible effect on the common bridge-pieces that fans had made and agreed fit quite well into the original puzzle.

In fact, the movies were just another puzzle, much smaller in complexity but using a colour-enhanced version of the original picture.

So how do we play this game? First, you should be clear (at least to yourself) on which pieces you're using. Second, you have to make clear mention of the popular bridge pieces in play and indicate where you're shaving a piece from the original to make it fit better. Third, you have to accept that not everyone will like the commonly-used bridge pieces that you prefer.

Last point- if you complain about the workmanship of the original puzzle pieces not being solveable, YOU'VE LOST THE GAME. This is the fanfic discussion equivalent of Godwin's law. If JKR is such a terrible writer, why have so many read through seven of her books and felt satisfied that they told a complete story? JKR's puzzle didn't have to be as stable as the Hoover Dam to see it reach the end height and shape. That you've now noticed the instability is admirable, but she finished her puzzle-tower-sculpture... unlike so many others who have built stronger towers but only took the structure partway (i.e.: all those beloved yet incomplete fics out there).

To all those who claim in argument that 'JKR is a bad writer' or 'this plothole is explained because the story started as kid-lit and then tried to grow up', I have to ask... did you first sit down to play Monopoly and complain, "Why would I pay to visit other people's houses when I rent out my own?" It's a game, doofus. If you think it's irredeemably bad in concept, design your own.

So, for those still interested in the game, I have a bunch of custom puzzle pieces for you to consider.

[[[]]]

See also: Watsonian vs. Doylist arguments

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Watsonian_vs._Doylist

Chapter Text

Ruminations - Brooms that fly

As with anything, this is all conjecture.

926 A.D.

It all started with a wizard milliner/thatcher named Orton who wanted his rye stalks to stand up straight and tall.

Like any decent farmer, Orton was proud of his work and saw the inevitable value of being popular, for whatever mad reason a village chose to define popularity. In his case, the village had the harvest competitions. Once per season except winter, they would gather and show off their best crops, offering others to judge them by whatever criteria they best demonstrated. 'My pumpkins are so large!' 'But have you tasted these carrots!' and etc.

 For those in the grain business, it was a bit harder to show off the value of their crop without having it milled and made into something. Orton's rye was often coming up short -- specifically, his stalks were wilty, so despite their obvious greater length, they appeared sickly in comparison. His rivals also teased him that his bread was just as bitter as he was.

 Casting magic at the competition would likely get him caught as cheating, so instead he mucked with the plant. Over the next season, late at night or early in the morning, he gently and regularly taught his crops to stand up straight. Once he had them oriented, the stalks knew to aim their tips to the heavens and their roots straight towards the ground. As a strange by-product, he discovered that harvesting the stalks was easier- as if the plants weighed almost nothing. Inspired, he reapplied himself to their cultivation, eventually developing stalks that would lift off the ground the second they were scythed from their anchors in the dirt.

 It was his son, William, who made the next discovery- in the process of binding a particularly 'lifty' bundle of stalks, he found that the collection began to float up towards the rafters. When he jumped to grab onto this bundle, his weight drew them down, but then a curious thing happened- the stalks seemed to draw upon Will's own adolescent energy, and the boy and bundle burst up through the thatched roof. The boy clung on for dear life, but that only seemed to accelerate their ascent.

 He was bewildered, but still a boy- once the panic passed, he found great fun in lurching about, this way and that, hundreds of feet in the air. After separating several of the stalks, his own weight and the lessened aggregate lifting effect brought him back to the ground.

 He didn't tell his father about his adventure- not immediately. Instead he carefully collected the bundles into many, much smaller sheafs, in order to prevent the lifting effect from becoming an issue in getting their wares to market.

 A few weeks later, the boy had a revelation while staring at his clumsy but attractive cousin Myrtle. As it was raining, they were working closely together in the portion of the barn that still had a roof. Will was separating hot ashes from a young dragon's manure into a brass vase, to later be mixed into their fertilizer. Myrtle was churning butter and teasing William by making all sorts of suggestive and indecent noises while working the dash pole. The girl would often get entangled with just about anything, possibly due to a lingering childhood jinx that caused her hair and ribbons to wrap around nearby objects like a climbing vine. On this occasion...

 Myrtle turned in concern when her stern was burned by the wyvern urn, and upturned her churner.

 William set aside his moment of poetic inspiration for another sort of revelation. He exclaimed, "If the lift is anchored at the base, I could grasp the handle and the whole thing would tip forward!" (...or something to that effect- he said it in Old Saxon or Welsh or something).

 William used the butter churner as a base and drilled holes into it so his toes could interleave with the stalk heads to feed them magic. He anchored the dash pole to the lid with pegs, gaining him a footrest in the bargain. When he first flew the flying churn-top, he found that he would need to rest back to an upright position and step around the base in order to reverse direction. The shaft as well needed to be quite long to afford him more options in changing his pitch, though he couldn't shimmy too far up the pole or his toes would lose their connection to the lifting stalks.

 It took years of tinkering to work out the selection of stalks for optimal lift quality and find better ways to join and bind them in order to balance the flight, but this was the first example of what became our modern flying broomstick.

 Will and his father showed off the invention at market, where it drew much head-scratching from the serious-minded hedge wizards and farmers. Their children were much more enthused, as were a quartet of German merchants. They asked many questions and eventually left with knowledge of Orton's Straight-growth Charm.

 Orton's lifting rye had no success as a thatching material though- it all tended to lift up and separate, leaving gaps in the thatch rather than settling in to provide proper shelter. The grain didn't taste any better, either.

 Years later, the German merchants had cultivated their own lifting plants, using wand-quality woods for both the shaft and twigs. They had discovered how to make the shaft from a horizontal branch in order to get a lifting body with perpendicular bias and leverage the twigs to control thrust and direction, thus advanced the technology of the flying pole into its more modern broomstick form. Wandlore is a factor here, as it was much easier to control via enchantment than physically adjusting the twigs.

[][]

 Rumor suggests that Baba Yaga used Orton's Straight-growth Charm on a stalagmite forming in a limestone cave that eventually became the pestle in her flying mortar-&-pestle. Yaga is also known as the first and only witch to permanently change herself into a hag so that she'd always have strong nails and teeth, so we don't discount the looney coming up with such a scheme. Rumor also suggests that her plan to make a narrow shaft of stone self-levitating was not done for the sake of a flying device, but that's a tale for an older and less-sober audience.

Chapter Text

Hogwarts Omniversity, a century from now

 "Class, I recognise that you've been studying magic for seven or more years now, and that some of you have been experiencing the magical world for even longer than that. What I ask of you now is to forget all that. Forget about enchantments and wands, potent potions and killer plants, great wizards, fell beasties and grim portents. Even forget the very word 'magic'. Forget all of it, except for one thing."

 Professor Carlisle allowed the class to react to his opening statement, letting the ones paying attention start to guess what the one thing was.

 "We are surrounded by the spirits of the dead."

[[]]

 "Perhaps eighty to a hundred thousand years ago, that was all there was of what would come to be known as magic- the living and the dead. All humans... more or less. Our people were a bit dimmer back in those days, owing to an inconsistent diet and no sense of how to avoid disease except to spurn or even kill the infected. We gathered in tribes for protection and shared our resources and divided our labors. We'd developed crude language in order to teach each other which red berries to avoid and how to catch a boar without getting gored. And to share our stories.

 "Language, memory..." Carlisle noted a hand being waved emphatically from the second row. "Miss Spindlecake, what is your problem?"

 "Professor, this sounds like you're referencing Neanderthal man, as we were taught in Muggle Anthropology."

 "Yes?"

 "Well... we've already learned about it, and I don't see what it has to do with Arithmancy seeing as number systems weren't really around until six thousand years ago."

 The professor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Miss Spindlecake... have you read or seen Shakespeare's play 'Romeo and Juliet'?"

 "No, sir."

 "In the end, they died, and it brought peace where there nearly had been war. Isn't that sad?"

 The girl squinted at him for a moment and then said, "I don't understand."

 "Exactly! If you don't hear the tale from the beginning, the end won't mean much to you. Please, everyone, have faith in the system that has put me in the position of teaching what is considered the most challenging subject at this school and let me tell the story. What, Mr. Ribberts?"

 "Roberts, sir. Are we going to be tested on this material?"

 "Every day for the rest of your lives." Seeing the likely follow-up in the boy's eyes, the professor added, "Yes, elements of this will be on the term exams. Are you lot really the best students in the school right now?"

 Even the girl from Hufflepuff was nodding. He sighed.

 "Right. Back to the dead. They await patiently, as always."

[the story of Sun Smile and Bad Ears]

 "There was a man named Sun Smile. He was the strongest, the smartest, the most genial, the most well-liked man in the valley. Men appreciated his hunting skills and his humour. He also was very good at settling disputes. Women... enjoyed his company, too. 

 "Sun Smile's best friend was Bad Ears, who was named such from having been born with a shriveled, non-functioning ear. They grew up together, and perhaps Bad Ears was his friend simply because he would never challenge Sun Smile's influence.

 "They played together, hunted together, swam together...

 "And one day Sun Smile died, quite suddenly. I suspect it was a stroke or some sort of heart attack, but the key here is that Sun Smile was dead before he knew he was dying

 "Bad Ears grieved- heck, the whole tribe grieved, and they also blamed Bad Ears- not in a 'you murdered him' sense, since there was nothing to explain how Sun Smile had died, but they were spooked.

 "Bad Ears was spooked as well, but he had no choice. If he insisted that they let him sleep in the village, surely one of them would dash in his head. He wandered off.

 "In time, he chose the wrong path, the wrong trail- however it happened Bad Ears ran afoul of a hungry pack of jackals. He climbed a tree on a precipice to get away from them, but the jackals were even more hungry than Bad Ears and they wouldn't stop trying to drag him down.

 "This next part is entirely conjecture, but it suits the story.

 "He had no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no voice and no hands but the spirit of Sun Smile could feel the distress of his good friend Bad Ears, and perhaps he could sense the excited hunger of the jackals readying to attack. Sun Smile tore a hole in something, hoping to help, and out came fire."

 "Professor, are you suggesting that spells aren't coming from us at all, but from... ghosts?"

 "My dear wizards and witches, I am telling you a story. When my story is complete, I will ask you a simple question- 'Aside from the names, am I wrong?' I have my reasons to believe what I believe about these matters, but the most important thing I would like from you is to give me a case of something we know to be true that conflicts with the model I've presented. You will not be permitted to submit your case until after the last lecture, because you won't have the complete model until that point."

 Several hands went up and Carlisle added, "Yes, you may record the lectures. I'm recording the lectures. The Headmistress is recording them, there may be as many as six other clairaudience charms at work even now, and I had to submit the lecture notes to the Department of Mysteries before they'd permit me to reveal my findings. Mind, I was sorely tempted to enchant the room so that transcriptions would simply repeat 'watermelons and canteloupes' instead of my speech, but I try not to frustrate people without a good, personal reason."

He then mumbled, "Gets to be you need to apply a prybar before trying to fill some minds."

[[]]

"The pack of predators was frightened off. Bad Ears had cause to call forth fire again as he nearly froze in the cold night. He tried to repeat the gestures and wails that had prompted his earlier salvation, but it eventually dawned on him that the key component he was missing was the desperation in his mind, and the flash of his friend's reassuring smile in answer.

"He tried many ways to bring himself to that state, and as his body curled in on its freezing core, he saw Sun Smile in his mind once more. Fire erupted over the prepared sticks. He was saved."

"It took days for the journey back to his clan, and each night he found it a little easier to call forth the fire to light his camp. It was a joy to him. I think it was a joy for Sun Smile as well, though I suspect that the ghost's memory of his living existence was already fading.

 "Bad Ears told his story to his people. He was jeered and beaten, particularly when he found that the fire would not be conjured simply to please the elders. He left the clan and took shelter in a cave. Once alone and in need, the fire once more came forth for him.

 "Years later, a young man from the clan sought him out, bringing a fresh-slain deer to share with the outcast. The two lived together for a time, until Bad Ears taught him how to call forth the fire."

 "And then Bad Ears died. Rather suddenly, in fact, due to a sharp rock being more sturdy than his skull.

 "The boy now calling himself Fire Hand returned home and drove out all the warriors, forcing them to abandon the clan or be burned. Fire Hand bedded all the women and kept the elders under his thumb to teach him all of their skills, and to teach those skills to his many children."

 "Only one child of his could ever call forth the fire- a daughter called Fire Rabbit. This young proto-witch killed her father to end his tyranny. Two of her children could call the fire- the rest could not."

"Fire Rabbit's great grandchildren became very friendly with the fire, and one particularly astute son named Charcoal (or its equivalent) noted that the gift spread more readily as the other descendants of Fire Hand died. Those who could call the fire were replaced in the next generation.

 "The oldest fully-formed ghost I have ever encountered was one of Charcoal's grandkids, named Stump. He was afraid of becoming a servant to his evil sister, known as Fire Breath Mother. Some of her descendants became the first dragons."

Chapter Text

Okay, so perhaps Arithmancy isn't exactly about mathematics, so much as the meaning of numbers.

Qabbalistic numerology ascribes certain qualities to each numeral. I've built up a headcanon about it somehow addressing how certain magic interacts with other magic. Rather than be saddled with the arbitrary meaning of letters in names = factors, I figured that magical arithmancy was about typifying spells and substances to better understand how they interact.

It would have grown out of the intuitive understanding discovered in potion-making over the centuries, but might not have gotten a regimented treatment until the 1800's, when scientific method began to help weed out inconsequential aspects of magic ('while standing in a wooden pail filled with fishtails, during a waxing moon...') that the truly meaningful patterns began to emerge.

Sorcerers always knew that hair made for the best source in Polyjuice, and that you can conjure water much more readily than milk, but arithmancy began to explain why.

http://www.astrology-numerology.com/numerology.html#numerology_introduction

Numerology reference
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i
j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r
s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | _

• 1 - pioneer, invention, leadership, independence, will, courage | aggression, ego, pride
• 2 - consideration, partnership, mediator, modest, spiritual | shy, timid, fearful
• 3 - expressive, artsy, insightfulness, optimism, fun | incompletion, lack of discipline
• 4 - order, values, growth, practical, cultivation, organization | serious, detail-locked, unimaginative
• 5 - freedom, quick thinking, action | discontent, impatience, restlessness
• 6 - nurturing, balance, community, domesticity, service | stubborn, meddling, subject to flattery
• 7 - seeker of knowledge, perfection | suspicious, reserved, isolated
• 8 - judgement, decision-making, achievement | workaholic repressive, inhumane, materialistic
• 9 - friendly, congenial, humanitarian | possessive, attention-seeking
• 11 - double 2 - exaggerated spirituality and fear
• 22 - double 4 - architecting (but humourless)

In the reference, you take each letter of a person's full name, translate the letters into values, add them up in various ways until you boil them down to a few archetypal traits.

My problem with much of the 'real-world' numerology is how arbitrary some of the qualities seem, even moreso when applied to the naming of children; would prospective Jewish parents approach the scholar about best names for encouraging certain traits, or was their attempt to 'game the system' likely to create a monster?

So I went back to the numbers themselves- ignore history, ignore pure mathematics. What do these numbers mean?

[another bit with Professor Carlisle]

"So, when we speak of arithmantic meaning, we are speaking of the whole of human spiritual culture, distilled into nigh-on universal meanings. These meanings vary with culture and you can see bias in the spirits of east Asia in comparison to those, say, of the deep Amazon, but their meanings are our meanings, often derived from more... mathematical truths.

"One. It is the smallest, the sole object. Alone yet complete. It's geometric representation is a dot."

"Not a sphere?"

"A dot. Zoom in on the dot and you will discover it is still a dot, because One has no subcomponents.

"Two. The essence of communication. From here to there. Two is represented by a circle- the center and orbit. It is also the symbol for pain and loss and fear, for only by cleaving one into two did everything start to hurt.

"Three. It takes the simple binary of two and adds a dimension, multiplying meaning, creating both dissention and dynamism. It is therefore also the number for creativity... and lies

"Four. the first multiple. Symbol is -- "

"A square."

"No, it's a three-sided pyramid. Four is a family, sustainable procreation. It is also stability and truth, for only by having two opposing sides sharing equal voice is there something to match against. It is also the first possible solid object- more than a shadow.

"Five. The hand, artifice, the incomplete array, the broken star- it also represents humanity in our lost-our-tails aspect and unrestrained power.

"Six. Armies. Two triangles arrayed at cross purposes. Also, a strong model for division and unification. Six also represents society and culture.

"Seven is the soul, and location. It establishes existence. The geometric representation of seven is a double pyramid. One point at the center, one length out, forward and back, to left and to right, up and down. All connected, they form the double pyramid, a reflection of life in death. Perfection, but also isolation.

"Eight. the cube, structure, architecting - also the compass, to chart a vector; plans and destinations

"Nine. squares of trios, or the spiral - the unfinished grouping - community - the compass with a center, to represent the ship."

Eleven and Twenty-two were made up, as far as I'm concerned. There's too much culture behind it and not enough prehistorical symbolism. It's like they miscalculated the factors on two and four, then tried to shoehorn in a second meaning to flatter someone or cover their error. Or maybe I'm too decimal-minded to find a meaning outside of my culture.